Terabase Energy is a Berkeley, California company building the digital and automation backbone for utility-scale solar construction. Its flagship Terafab automated field factory and Construct software platform are designed to slash the cost and time of building solar power plants at terawatt scale.
Tessa Lau is the founder and CEO of Dusty Robotics, a Mountain View-based company that builds autonomous mobile robots for the construction industry. Her FieldPrinter robot uses building information model (BIM) data to print layout lines directly onto jobsite floors with 1/16-inch accuracy, replacing manual chalk-line methods that have dominated construction for centuries. Lau holds a PhD in machine learning from the University of Washington and spent 11 years at IBM Research before pivoting to robotics at Willow Garage and co-founding hotel-delivery-robot company Savioke. She launched Dusty Robotics in 2018, has raised $69.5 million including a $45 million Series B, and has helped contractors print over 100 million square feet of layout across thousands of buildings.
Banks Hunter is the co-founder and CEO of Charge Robotics, a Berkeley-based startup building the world's first fully automated solar construction system. An MIT mechanical engineering alumnus and veteran of medical robotics startup Vicarious Surgical, Hunter co-founded Charge Robotics in 2021 with Max Justicz to solve one of clean energy's most stubborn bottlenecks: the physical, labor-intensive grunt work of assembling a utility-scale solar farm. His company's Sunrise system - a portable robotic assembly line shipped directly to job sites - autonomously puts together 800-pound solar bays and deploys them in the field, aiming to make solar installation as repeatable and scalable as factory production. Backed by Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Energy Impact Partners, and Y Combinator, Charge Robotics has raised over $39 million to accelerate the energy transition.