energy-infrastructure
(9)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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.