
A SIM card in a remote solar system helped shape the idea behind SwitchDin. Andrew Mears’s route from BHP apprentice to energy founder has been a continuing search for ways to make useful technology work for people.

From chemical engineering to energy investing, Himanshu Saxena has built a career around the connections that make infrastructure work. Ten West Link offers a 125-mile illustration of the patience involved.

He returned to Six Nations to bring his children closer to their culture. His work since then has helped put the community on the ownership side of Ontario’s energy business.

From carbon consulting to solar parks, Manan Thakkar has helped build Prozeal around the energy needs of industry. His next challenge begins when the panels stop producing.

The Station A co-founder spent years watching viable clean-energy projects stall in spreadsheets and sales cycles. His answer is a marketplace built around a deceptively simple input: an address.

A college graduate headed west by way of national parks, landed in an energy office as a temp, and stayed for the industry’s long conversion. Now Jesse Gronner is betting that clean power runs on turbines, patient capital, and something harder to engineer: trust.

The Australian dealmaker survived a bank collapse, helped build and sell a renewable-gas platform, and now wants batteries to become ordinary infrastructure in Austria. His bet is less about chemistry than patience, permits and bankable cash flows.

The lawyer-turned-developer learned that solar runs on statutes, queues and trust as much as sunshine. At Arena Renewables, that education became a near-1 GW pipeline and an acquisition before the company’s third anniversary.
Christopher Gosline was the co-founder and first CEO of SYSO Technologies, a Boston company that turns passive solar, wind, and battery projects into active participants in wholesale power markets. Before SYSO, he ran a $100M+ software business at demand-response pioneer EnerNOC and helped build BlueWave Solar as a senior vice president. Trained in geographic information systems and energy policy, he spent more than two decades pushing toward a grid that runs without fossil fuels, and was known as much for the team he built as for the funding rounds he closed.
Zach Dell is the co-founder and CEO of Base Power, an Austin battery-and-electricity company he started in 2023 with former SpaceX and Anduril manufacturing leader Justin Lopas. Base sells homeowners a leased backup battery for a one-time $695 plus a $19 monthly membership and retail electricity, then knits those household batteries into a distributed grid that charges on cheap overnight power and discharges at peak. In under three years the company raised a $1 billion Series C at a roughly $4 billion valuation and, by mid-2026, was in talks to raise again near a $12 billion valuation. The son of Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell, Zach traces his energy obsession to college experiments that included trying to lease a Hawaiian lava field for solar and building anaerobic digesters in India.

Adam Silver is the co-founder and CEO of Plural (Plural Finance / Plural Energy), a San Francisco startup building a financial operating system for energy infrastructure. Plural tokenizes real-world clean energy assets - solar arrays, batteries, and data centers - turning them into programmable, investable products, and runs a FINRA-member broker-dealer with a transfer agent license. A former Deloitte consultant and ServiceNow product lead, Silver became obsessed with what he calls 'the miracle of lights turning on,' then with the unacceptable difficulty of financing the assets behind it. In September 2025 Plural closed an oversubscribed $7.13M seed round led by Paradigm, bringing total funding to roughly $9.3M, with over $300M in distributed solar and battery assets available for investment.
Bill Grinstead is the co-founder and CEO of Orenda, a Brooklyn-based renewable energy company building standalone battery storage that keeps New York City's overloaded grid from buckling. A former finance professional who cut his teeth at Susquehanna International Group and the $7B private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners, Grinstead traded markets for megawatts in 2020. Under his lead, Orenda has grown into one of the largest energy storage developers in downstate New York, claiming roughly a 34% share of the NYC storage market and a development pipeline measured in the hundreds of megawatts, while handling everything from site origination and permitting to construction and live operations.
Nanna Nielsen is the Chief Business Officer of Critical Loop, a Los Angeles-area industrial power company that helps factories, airports and data centers get electricity in days instead of years by pairing battery storage with autonomous control software. A Danish-born operator who once ran banking operations for fintech unicorn GoCardless - overseeing more than $52 billion in transactions for 93,000+ businesses - she now applies that same operational rigor to fixing America's grid bottleneck. The company raised a $26 million Series A in April 2026.
Nicholas Speyer is the co-founder and CEO of SYSO Technologies, a Boston-based market operations firm that runs renewable and battery storage assets in the wholesale power markets. Under his leadership, SYSO has grown to manage more than 4.5 gigawatts across 300+ sites in every major ISO/RTO market and into Canada, backed by a $15.5M Series B from Kimmeridge, New Energy Capital and MassMutual Ventures. A Stanford-trained energy resources engineer, Speyer spent two decades building energy-software and efficiency businesses before turning SYSO into what its investors call the clear leader in its space.
Ryan Hanley is the Founder and CEO of Equilibrium Energy, the company building PowerOS - an agentic AI platform purpose-built for the power industry. A civil engineer turned energy executive, Hanley spent nearly two decades inside the machine of grid transformation at PG&E, SolarCity, Tesla, and Shell before founding Equilibrium in 2021. With $100M+ raised and NRG Energy as a production customer, he is making a direct bet that AI can unify the fragmented data and systems that hold the power grid back.