energy-infrastructure
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Keel Infrastructure Is Betting the AI Boom Will Be Won Before the Servers Arrive
The company formerly known as Bitfarms has traded Bitcoin mines for a 2.2-gigawatt pipeline of powered sites. Now it has to turn scarce megawatts into long-term tenants.
Al Blackburn and the quiet machinery that keeps Virginia on
Al Blackburn's public profile is spare, but the system around his name is anything but: millions of customers, tens of thousands of miles of wire, and an energy transition measured in decades.
Chris Scherman Is Learning to Read the Energy Map Before It Is Drawn
A lawyer moved from contracts to corporate strategy. At Pembina, Chris Scherman now works where long-lived infrastructure, customer demand and the next version of the energy map meet.
Tesla Wants to Sell You a Car - Then Replace the Grid Around It
The company that made the electric car feel inevitable is now trying to turn vehicles, batteries, chargers and software into one enormous machine. The cars still pay most of the bills, but Tesla's next argument is about infrastructure.
The Bloom Box Was Built for Mars. AI Made It Urgent.
Bloom Energy spent a quarter-century turning a NASA-inspired ceramic fuel cell into an onsite power business. Now the grid bottleneck - and AI's appetite for electricity - has made the once-futuristic Bloom Box a very practical machine.
Vestas Built 200 Gigawatts of Wind - Now the Real Business Is Keeping It Spinning
The Danish manufacturer sells machines the height of skyscrapers, then stays for decades to keep them productive. Its 200-gigawatt installed base has become both an engineering record and a service network competitors must chase.
The $4.50 Cleaning Bet That Now Runs 6 Billion Square Feet a Day
ABM began with a bucket, a sponge, a mop and $4.50. Today it sells something far more complicated: the promise that airports depart, data centers stay awake and ballparks are ready before the gates open.
Ameresco Found a Way to Make Old Buildings Pay for Their Own Future
The Framingham company sells a practical bargain: modernize the systems everyone depends on, then use the avoided utility bill to help pay for the work. Now data centers are turning that old energy-services idea into a new power-infrastructure business.
Netceed
Netceed sells the unglamorous pieces that make modern networks possible - then adds the engineering, inventory and logistics discipline that keeps thousands of those pieces arriving in the right order.
Tennessee Valley Authority
TVA sells electricity, manages a river and recruits factories - a New Deal institution now being tested by record demand, a multibillion-dollar buildout and the uncertain promise of small nuclear reactors.
Leila Dillon
Leila Dillon has built a career explaining the systems most people notice only when they fail - from sensor-equipped city bins to the energy infrastructure beneath schools, governments and businesses.
Pembina Pipeline Corporation
Pembina spent seven decades turning one Alberta oil line into a continental chain of pipes, plants, caverns and terminals. Now that same network is being asked to move Canadian molecules to Asia, feed petrochemical plants and power the AI economy.
Tarun Batchu
Tarun Batchu is the co-founder and CEO of Vela Energy, a startup building AI execution agents for large-load energy projects - software that reads a project's real records and drafts the procurement, permitting, and engineering work needed to move interconnection queues faster, always stopping for a human to approve. He started chasing energy problems at 12 with a carbon-capture project that reached ExxonMobil, spent his teens in climate policy and community organizing, and studied EECS and business through UC Berkeley's M.E.T. program before raising a $1.3M pre-seed led by a16z Speedrun and Z Fellows.
Vela Energy
Vela Energy builds AI execution agents for large-load energy projects, automating the procurement, permitting, and engineering-study work that stalls data center and utility interconnections. Founded by Tarun Batchu and Tony Li and backed by a16z Speedrun and Z Fellows, the company aims to be the intelligence layer that helps developers, utilities, and data centers move projects through the interconnection queue faster while keeping licensed engineers in control of every decision.
Symphony Infrastructure Partners
Symphony Infrastructure Partners is a Sydney-based energy transition infrastructure services platform that develops, delivers, owns and operates high-voltage grid-connection infrastructure for Australia's renewable energy, storage and data-centre projects. Founded in 2022 by Steve Butler, Symphony offers an end-to-end integrated solution - from grid strategy and engineering design through HV construction, commissioning, operations and asset ownership - aiming to eliminate the connection bottlenecks that slow the rollout of wind, solar, battery and digital infrastructure. In 2024 it raised A$488 million in Series A financing led by Blackstone to fund a series of acquisitions and build one of Australia's leading independent connection-infrastructure platforms.
Timothy Barat
Timothy Barat is the co-founder and CEO of Gridware, a San Francisco climate-tech company that builds pole-mounted sensors to detect power grid failures before they cause outages or wildfires. A former electrical lineworker from Victoria, Australia who lived through the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, Barat moved to the United States, earned bachelor's and master's degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley, and founded Gridware in 2020 with Hall Chen and Abdulrahman Bin Omar. His Gridscope device, described as a 'Fitbit for power poles,' listens to the mechanical and electrical signals of the grid to pinpoint hazards. Gridware has raised roughly $97 million to date, including a $55 million Series B in November 2025, and its co-founders were named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 Social Impact list.
LineVision
LineVision is a Boston-based grid intelligence company that helps electric utilities get more capacity, reliability, and safety out of existing transmission lines. Its patented non-contact sensors mount on transmission towers - not the live wires - and pair LiDAR-based measurements of conductor position with AI-driven, hyperlocal wind forecasting and computational fluid dynamics to calculate a line's real-time thermal capacity. Through its Dynamic Line Rating, situational awareness, and asset-health products, LineVision typically unlocks 30%+ additional capacity on monitored lines at a fraction of the cost and time of building new transmission, supporting faster renewable integration and a more resilient grid.
Gridware
Gridware builds pole-mounted sensors and an analytics platform that give electric utilities real-time awareness of what is physically happening on their power lines. Its Gridscope device measures mechanical, electrical, and environmental signals directly at the pole, and its Active Grid Response platform turns those signals into immediate hazard detection, precise fault localization, and faster outage response. Founded in 2020 by three UC Berkeley graduate students - including a former lineman - Gridware aims to close the 'hazard awareness delay' that leaves utilities blind to fallen limbs and damaged lines until after they spark outages or wildfires.
Orenda, Inc
Orenda, Inc is a Brooklyn-based renewable energy company that develops, builds, and operates standalone battery energy storage projects across densely populated Downstate New York. Founded in 2020, Orenda handles the full lifecycle - site diligence, permitting, interconnection, engineering, construction, financing, and ongoing asset management - and pairs it with an AI/ML software platform that forecasts energy prices and optimizes when its battery fleets charge and discharge. The company claims roughly a 34% market share in New York City with a development pipeline of about 920 MW / 2.7 GWh, and is co-developing roughly 675 MW of distributed storage with the New York Power Authority.
Charge Robotics
Charge Robotics builds robots that automate the most labor-intensive parts of building solar farms. Its flagship product, Sunrise, is a portable assembly line that ships to a project site, robotically snaps together solar 'bays', quality-checks them with machine vision, and uses an autonomous vehicle to place them in the field. Founded in 2021 by MIT engineers Banks Hunter and Max Justicz, the Y Combinator-backed company aims to be the 'Henry Ford moment for solar', removing the labor bottleneck that limits how fast the grid can go renewable.
Verne
Verne is a San Francisco climate-tech company building high-density cryo-compressed hydrogen (CcH2) storage and power systems. Founded in 2020 by Stanford and UC-Berkeley alumni, Verne developed a method to store hydrogen at up to 73 g/L - roughly 33% denser than liquid hydrogen and 87% denser than 700-bar compressed gas - without the cost of full liquefaction. After proving the technology on the world's first CcH2-powered Class 8 truck in 2024, Verne has expanded into turnkey zero-emission on-site power, targeting data centers, ports, construction sites and EV charging with modular hydrogen-to-power systems.
Adam Silver
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
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.
Fourier
Fourier is a Palo Alto-based clean-energy company building modular, fully automated electrolyzers that produce green hydrogen on-site and on-demand. By borrowing architecture from the data center industry - racks of small, software-managed electrolyzer 'blades' running on reprogrammed mass-produced power supplies - Fourier aims to eliminate the costly, hazardous transportation and storage that inflate hydrogen prices, making clean hydrogen practical for heavy industry, transportation fuel, and distributed energy storage.
Heron Power
Heron Power is a Scotts Valley, California company building solid-state transformers - power electronics purpose-built for the modern electrical grid. Founded in 2025 by former Tesla powertrain and energy chief Drew Baglino, its flagship Heron Link converts medium-voltage electricity to usable low-voltage power in a modular, software-integrated package, replacing the century-old iron-core transformer. The company targets utility-scale solar, grid-scale batteries, and hyperscale AI data centers, and is building a 40-gigawatt US factory to meet a backlog of orders.
Brian Barlow
Brian Barlow is the co-founder and co-CEO of Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP), the Alphabet spinout that owns, operates, and invests in next-generation energy, mobility, water, and digital infrastructure. He brings three decades of private equity, venture capital, and infrastructure investing - including a stint inside Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs and an early seat at Michael Burry's Scion Capital - to the question of how to fund and build the infrastructure cities actually need. SIP launched in 2020 with a $400 million backing from Google and has since seeded ventures like Renew Home and AMP Robotics.
Fernando Llaver
Fernando Llaver is the CEO and Co-Founder of Splight, a San Francisco-based AI company that unlocks hidden transmission capacity on existing electricity grids using machine learning - without building new infrastructure. A veteran of more than two decades in the energy industry, he left a C-level role to co-found Splight in 2021 alongside CTO Thomas Vadora and Chief Data Scientist Carlos Caldart. Splight's Dynamic Congestion Management technology now manages over 6 gigawatts of grid assets across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America, and has raised $28.1M in total funding. Llaver was invited by the International Energy Agency to join global leaders in Paris to discuss energy and AI, and is a member of the Unreasonable Group portfolio of entrepreneurs tackling major global challenges.