energy-engineering
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Nikhil Bharadwaj Put the Cloud on Notice
The Xeal co-founder learned EV charging’s least glamorous lesson in concrete garages: if the network disappears, the product cannot. His answer was to move the essential work closer to the plug.
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.