SEW.AI began by making utility self-service less painful. Now it wants to connect the customer, the field crew and the grid - without asking a century-old industry to rip out everything underneath.
A hungry lion helped inspire the first device. Two decades later, ikeGPS has narrowed its sights to an unglamorous object with enormous consequences - the utility pole - and built a high-margin software business around it.
FortisBC is trying to modernize a century-old energy system without making reliability or affordability the collateral damage. The playbook is unusually practical: blend cleaner fuels, fund many small experiments, partner early and let regulators kill the ideas that cannot yet carry their cost.
Utilities learned how to photograph every pole and tower. Then the pictures piled up. Buzz Solutions built the software layer that turns that visual backlog into repair orders - and a wind-turbine class project into a utility business.
Energy Impact Partners built a venture firm around a stubborn fact: energy startups do not scale on capital alone. Its coalition model puts the utilities and industrial companies that might buy, test and deploy new technology inside the investment platform.
For 130 years, Landis+Gyr has counted electricity. Its next act is to turn the meter on your wall into a sensor, a computer and a traffic cop for an increasingly unruly grid.
It started as a Richmond streetcar company in 1909. Today Dominion Energy runs power plants, gas lines and a 176-turbine wind farm 27 miles out to sea - and the fastest-growing customers on its grid are warehouses full of servers.
LineVision is a Boston-based grid intelligence company that helps electric utilities get more capacity, reliability, and safety out of existing transmission lines. Its patented non-contact sensors mount on transmission towers - not the live wires - and pair LiDAR-based measurements of conductor position with AI-driven, hyperlocal wind forecasting and computational fluid dynamics to calculate a line's real-time thermal capacity. Through its Dynamic Line Rating, situational awareness, and asset-health products, LineVision typically unlocks 30%+ additional capacity on monitored lines at a fraction of the cost and time of building new transmission, supporting faster renewable integration and a more resilient grid.
E2 Consulting Engineers is a multidisciplinary engineering and technical consulting firm founded in 1988 and headquartered in Emeryville, California. It delivers project management, engineering and design, construction management and inspection, environmental permitting and remediation, and federal support services to investor-owned utilities, government agencies, and infrastructure operators across North America. With more than 800 professionals in 11 U.S. offices, E2 supports grid modernization, wildfire mitigation, pipeline safety, and water infrastructure programs. In June 2026 it was acquired by EIP-backed Guardian Infrastructure Services.
Heron Power is a Scotts Valley, California company building solid-state transformers - power electronics purpose-built for the modern electrical grid. Founded in 2025 by former Tesla powertrain and energy chief Drew Baglino, its flagship Heron Link converts medium-voltage electricity to usable low-voltage power in a modular, software-integrated package, replacing the century-old iron-core transformer. The company targets utility-scale solar, grid-scale batteries, and hyperscale AI data centers, and is building a 40-gigawatt US factory to meet a backlog of orders.