grid-flexibility
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Shwan Lamei
Shwan Lamei is co-founder and CEO of Emulate Energy, a Lund- and Boston-based software company that turns everyday household devices - heat pumps, EV chargers, home batteries, solar inverters - into a coordinated 'virtual battery' that utilities can dispatch on flexibility and balancing markets. Trained as an industrial engineer at Lund University, he spent 15 years in industrial B2B sales and corporate development at SWEP and Dover before starting Emulate in 2020 with a childhood friend whose MIT postdoctoral research became the technical seed of the company. In April 2025 Emulate closed a EUR 5M Series A led by Helen Ventures to scale its DER orchestration platform across Scandinavia, the DACH region and the United States.
Rahul Kar
Rahul Kar is the founder and CEO of Hammerhead AI, a Redwood City startup that uses reinforcement-learning control agents to squeeze stranded power out of AI data centers. After helping build and scale AutoGrid - the distributed-energy software pioneer acquired by Schneider Electric - Kar launched Hammerhead in November 2025 with a $10M seed round led by Buoyant Ventures. His thesis is blunt: the real bottleneck for AI is not chips or models, it is power, and most data centers run at 30-50% of their allocated capacity. Hammerhead's ORCA platform orchestrates power, cooling, and compute in real time to unlock roughly 30% more usable capacity without touching the grid.