grid-interconnection
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The Solar Team That Builds to Sell, Not to Hold
Three industry veterans bet that community solar's real money is in development, not ownership. Two and a half years later, Headwater Energy bought the whole pipeline.
Vela Energy
Vela Energy builds AI execution agents for large-load energy projects, automating the procurement, permitting, and engineering-study work that stalls data center and utility interconnections. Founded by Tarun Batchu and Tony Li and backed by a16z Speedrun and Z Fellows, the company aims to be the intelligence layer that helps developers, utilities, and data centers move projects through the interconnection queue faster while keeping licensed engineers in control of every decision.
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.
Nanna Nielsen
Nanna Nielsen is the Chief Business Officer of Critical Loop, a Los Angeles-area industrial power company that helps factories, airports and data centers get electricity in days instead of years by pairing battery storage with autonomous control software. A Danish-born operator who once ran banking operations for fintech unicorn GoCardless - overseeing more than $52 billion in transactions for 93,000+ businesses - she now applies that same operational rigor to fixing America's grid bottleneck. The company raised a $26 million Series A in April 2026.