energy-resilience
(7)
Generac
How a generator built in a Wisconsin barn became the machine millions of Americans buy the week after the power goes out - and why Generac now wants a say in the grid itself.
Jordan Bramble
Jordan Bramble is the co-founder and CEO of Antares Nuclear (Antares Industries), a Torrance, California company building factory-produced, transportable fission microreactors of up to 1 MW for defense, remote industrial, and space applications. A systems engineer and physicist who did a stint in federal policy at the White House Office of Management and Budget, Bramble started Antares in 2023 on a contrarian bet: instead of chasing the commercial grid on price, sell nuclear's unique capability to customers who need power where the grid and diesel can't reach. Under his leadership Antares raised more than $130 million, built out a 145,000-square-foot factory, and in June 2026 became the first private company to bring an advanced reactor - its Mark-0 - to criticality under the U.S. Department of Energy's Reactor Pilot Program. His stated ambition is to make energy abundant 'from Earth to the Asteroid Belt.'
Critical Loop
Critical Loop is an industrial power company founded in 2023 by former SpaceX, Tesla and Palantir engineers. It deploys modular, relocatable battery-storage microgrids - paired with its software-defined controller, Cygnus - to give factories, data centers, airports and other grid-constrained sites reliable power in weeks instead of waiting years for utility upgrades. The company raised a $26M Series A in April 2026, bringing total committed funding to $49M, and operates a fleet of control nodes across California.
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.
Hover Energy
Hover Energy is a Dallas-based clean-energy company that builds patented Wind-Powered Microgrids - rooftop arrays of compact 36 kW turbines that turn a building's own edge into a sail, combined with solar, storage, and an AI-driven control stack. The system is designed to offset most or all of a building's power use on site, delivering resilient, behind-the-meter electricity to commercial, industrial, and data-center customers. Paired with IBM's watsonx and Maximo software and scaled through joint ventures like EverOn Energy, Hover pitches an Energy-as-a-Service path to what it calls 'real zero.'
Antares
Antares is a nuclear fission energy company building factory-produced, transportable microreactors that deliver strategic power for mission-critical systems across land, sea, and space. Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Torrance, California, its R1 reactor uses TRISO fuel, sodium heat pipes, and a nitrogen Brayton cycle to produce 100kWe-1MWe for six-plus years. In June 2026 its Mark-0 reactor became the first privately developed advanced reactor to achieve criticality under the U.S. Department of Energy's Reactor Pilot Program.
Sam D'Amico
Sam D'Amico is the founder and CEO of Impulse Labs, a San Francisco-based startup building the world's most powerful and precise home appliances. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer who cut his teeth writing battery firmware for a solar car, then spent a decade building AR/VR hardware at Google Glass, Oculus, and Meta, D'Amico founded Impulse in 2021 after eating a pizza in 45 seconds at a wood-fired restaurant in Tokyo and deciding he needed to bring that power home. The result: a $5,999 battery-integrated induction cooktop that plugs into a standard outlet, boils a liter of water in under 40 seconds, and moonlights as a distributed grid storage node. Impulse has raised $25 million from Lux Capital, Fifth Wall, Lachy Groom, and Construct Capital.