energy-startup
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Zach Dell
Zach Dell is the co-founder and CEO of Base Power, an Austin battery-and-electricity company he started in 2023 with former SpaceX and Anduril manufacturing leader Justin Lopas. Base sells homeowners a leased backup battery for a one-time $695 plus a $19 monthly membership and retail electricity, then knits those household batteries into a distributed grid that charges on cheap overnight power and discharges at peak. In under three years the company raised a $1 billion Series C at a roughly $4 billion valuation and, by mid-2026, was in talks to raise again near a $12 billion valuation. The son of Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell, Zach traces his energy obsession to college experiments that included trying to lease a Hawaiian lava field for solar and building anaerobic digesters in India.
Zack Schmitz
Zack Schmitz is the co-founder and CEO of Public Grid, a renewable-energy platform that lets apartment renters switch to 100% clean electricity through their existing utility account at no added cost. A former Deloitte consultant with an MIT master's spanning electrical engineering and human-centered design, he built Public Grid (formerly Cottage Energy) to attack the unglamorous middle of the energy market: the roughly 20 million U.S. renters in deregulated states who never get a say in where their power comes from. The platform brokers clean energy in bulk, splits the savings, and follows residents from address to address.
Zanskar
Zanskar is a Salt Lake City geothermal company that uses artificial intelligence and computational geoscience to find, de-risk, and develop naturally occurring geothermal energy. By applying machine learning to vast troves of geological data, Zanskar pinpoints 'blind' hydrothermal reservoirs that leave no clue at the surface, cutting the exploration risk that has long kept geothermal expensive. The company is now moving from discovery to building its own power plants, with a multi-gigawatt pipeline aimed at making 24/7 carbon-free power cost-competitive.