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Lancium Bet on Bitcoin’s Power Problem. AI Made the Grid Its Product
Lancium started by teaching Bitcoin mines when to switch off. A delayed rollout and the AI power crunch turned that clever software idea into something much bigger: the land, wires and energy system beneath gigawatt-scale computing.
Gridmatic Wants to Turn the Power Grid Into a Forecasting Problem
The former Google engineer behind Gridmatic is applying search-ad automation to a harder auction: electricity. The company now trades across all seven major U.S. power markets, operates batteries in Texas and California, and sells energy to businesses that need cost certainty without giving up cleaner power.
Base Power Company
Base Power is an Austin-based energy company that installs large-capacity home batteries and sells electricity to homeowners as a licensed Texas retail electric provider. Founded in 2023 by Zach Dell and Justin Lopas, it pairs whole-home backup with low fixed rates, using its growing fleet of distributed batteries as a virtual power plant that charges when power is cheap and discharges when the grid is strained. The company raised a $1 billion Series C in October 2025 at a $4 billion valuation and is building its own battery factory in Austin to scale nationally.
Tyba
Tyba is a San Francisco-based climate software company that helps energy companies develop, model, and operate battery energy storage projects more profitably. Its AI-driven platform pairs a Project Simulation product - which backtests and forecasts revenue for storage assets in development - with an Asset Operations product that automates real-time bidding and dispatch in wholesale power markets like ERCOT and CAISO. Founded in 2022 by former energy developers and infrastructure engineers, Tyba positions itself as the 'autopilot for batteries,' emphasizing transparent, non-black-box optimization. The company raised a $13.9M Series A led by Energize Capital in February 2025.
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.
Rob Cirincione
Rob Cirincione is the co-founder and CEO of Sunairio, a Baltimore-based weather intelligence company that helps energy traders, utilities, and grid planners price the risk hiding inside the weather. A Princeton-trained engineer with a master's from MIT, he spent over 12 years trading power at Constellation Energy and Boston Energy Trading & Marketing before deciding the off-the-shelf weather forecasts the whole industry relied on were dangerously blurry. Sunairio runs thousands of high-resolution simulations to catch the rare extreme hours that drive most grid risk, and in 2025 launched ONE, a next-generation grid forecast model trained on its proprietary high-resolution climate archive.
ElectronX
ElectronX is a U.S.-regulated electricity derivatives exchange building the financial infrastructure for the energy transition. Founded in 2024 and based in Chicago with a New York office, it offers direct-access, centrally cleared hourly power futures and binary options that let utilities, traders, renewable operators, energy-storage firms and data-center operators hedge the extreme short-term price swings that come with a grid increasingly powered by intermittent wind and solar. ElectronX holds CFTC approvals as both a Designated Contract Market and a Designated Clearing Organization, and has raised more than $55 million from investors including DCVC, Innovation Endeavors, and the venture arms of Shell and Equinor.
Sam Tegel
Sam Tegel is the CEO of ElectronX, the Chicago-based exchange that in 2026 launched the first U.S.-regulated, direct-access power derivatives market. After more than two decades building market-making and liquidity businesses at firms like Jump Trading, Millennium, Sun Trading and Caherciveen Partners, Tegel now sells 1-megawatt-hour electricity futures and binary options to anyone exposed to the wild swings of the modern grid - from battery operators to bitcoin miners. ElectronX has raised more than $55 million and holds both Designated Contract Market and Designated Clearing Organization status from the CFTC.
Ryan Hanley
Ryan Hanley is the Founder and CEO of Equilibrium Energy, the company building PowerOS - an agentic AI platform purpose-built for the power industry. A civil engineer turned energy executive, Hanley spent nearly two decades inside the machine of grid transformation at PG&E, SolarCity, Tesla, and Shell before founding Equilibrium in 2021. With $100M+ raised and NRG Energy as a production customer, he is making a direct bet that AI can unify the fragmented data and systems that hold the power grid back.