data-center-power
(5)
Rahul Kar
Rahul Kar is the founder and CEO of Hammerhead AI, a Redwood City startup that uses reinforcement-learning control agents to squeeze stranded power out of AI data centers. After helping build and scale AutoGrid - the distributed-energy software pioneer acquired by Schneider Electric - Kar launched Hammerhead in November 2025 with a $10M seed round led by Buoyant Ventures. His thesis is blunt: the real bottleneck for AI is not chips or models, it is power, and most data centers run at 30-50% of their allocated capacity. Hammerhead's ORCA platform orchestrates power, cooling, and compute in real time to unlock roughly 30% more usable capacity without touching the grid.
Bret Kugelmass
Bret Kugelmass is the founder and CEO of Last Energy, an Austin-based company building factory-made 20-megawatt nuclear power plants designed to be shipped, assembled, and switched on like industrial equipment rather than built on-site like cathedrals. A Stanford-trained roboticist who once helped build a lunar rover control device at NASA, he sold a drone startup, then interviewed more than 800 nuclear experts on his Titans of Nuclear podcast before concluding that the technology was never the problem - the cost of slow, custom construction was. Last Energy has raised about $164 million, closing an oversubscribed $100 million Series C in December 2025, and is racing to plug a pilot reactor into the Texas A&M-RELLIS grid by mid-2026.
Drew Baglino
Drew Baglino spent 18 years at Tesla building the guts of the electric age - the Model S powertrain, the Powerwall and Megapack, the 4680 battery cell and a clean-sheet 50 GWh factory in Texas. In 2024 he walked away as Senior Vice President of Powertrain and Energy and aimed his next act at the one piece of grid hardware almost nobody had touched in a century: the transformer. His startup, Heron Power, builds software-controlled solid-state transformers and in February 2026 raised a $140 million Series B co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Breakthrough Energy Ventures to build a 40 GW U.S. factory. He also quietly founded a residential heat-pump company, Sadi Thermal Machines.
Tim Heidel
Tim Heidel is the co-founder and CEO of VEIR, a Massachusetts startup building overhead superconducting transmission lines that can carry five to ten times the power of conventional lines on roughly the same footprint. An MIT-trained electrical engineer who ran the research behind MIT's Future of the Electric Grid study, then steered a portfolio of grid projects at ARPA-E and vetted climate bets at Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Heidel concluded that the grid's biggest bottleneck was transmission itself - too slow, too costly, too ugly to permit. VEIR is his answer: black pipes carrying superconducting tape bathed in liquid nitrogen at -321F, aimed squarely at AI data centers, utilities and renewable developers.
Amit Narayan
Amit Narayan is the Co-Founder and CEO of GridCARE, a Redwood City-based generative AI company that unlocks hidden power grid capacity to slash data center connection timelines from 5-7 years to 6-12 months. A serial entrepreneur with a PhD from UC Berkeley and a B.Tech from IIT Kanpur, he previously founded AutoGrid (acquired by Schneider Electric in 2022) and Berkeley Design Automation (acquired by Mentor Graphics in 2014), and holds 7 U.S. patents across semiconductor design and energy software. GridCARE emerged from stealth in May 2025 with a $13.5M seed round led by Xora and backed by Tom Steyer, Ram Shriram, and Breakthrough Energy, targeting what Narayan calls the defining constraint on AI: immediate access to power.