grid-reliability
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NRG Wants to Run the Power Plant - and Your Thermostat
NRG spent years becoming a retailer you might meet on an electricity bill. Now it is joining power plants, smart homes and flexible demand into one system - a bet that the winner in the next energy cycle will understand both sides of the meter.
Vistra Corp.
Vistra sells power at both ends of the wire: a sprawling fleet makes the electricity, while familiar retail brands sell it to nearly 5 million customers. The result is a revealing bet on what the American grid needs next - nuclear endurance, gas flexibility, batteries, and a great deal more demand.
Tennessee Valley Authority
TVA sells electricity, manages a river and recruits factories - a New Deal institution now being tested by record demand, a multibillion-dollar buildout and the uncertain promise of small nuclear reactors.
AGent Energy
AGent Energy (branded AiGent) is a Houston-based energy-tech company that uses AI software and secure hardware to aggregate, orchestrate, and monetize idle backup generators at commercial, industrial, and mission-critical sites. By connecting these behind-the-meter assets to wholesale power markets during peak demand and grid emergencies, AGent turns standby liabilities into dispatchable, revenue-generating distributed power plants - improving grid reliability without building new infrastructure. The company is targeting a roughly 185 GW fleet of existing backup generation across the U.S.
Sunairio
Sunairio is a Baltimore-based climate-and-energy analytics company that builds next-generation grid forecasting software where weather, climate, and energy meet. Its flagship platform, Sunairio ONE, generates 1,000 ensemble forecast paths - versus the 50 typical of legacy methods - to capture the extreme, hyperlocal weather events that break grids and portfolios. Spanning timescales from the next 15 days to the next 15 years, Sunairio helps utilities, renewable developers, traders, and investors plan for volatility instead of being surprised by it.
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.
Stephanie Hendricks
Stephanie Hendricks is the co-founder and CEO of AGent Energy (formerly AiGent), a Houston-based energy technology company that uses AI to turn idle backup generators into dispatchable grid resources. A former Naval Warfare Intelligence officer with top-secret clearance and the ex-COO of demand-response leader Voltus, she is building software that aggregates and monetizes the roughly 185 GW of underutilized backup generation sitting across American commercial, industrial, and data-center sites. In August 2025 the company raised a $6M seed round led by Zero Infinity Partners and CIV.
Recurve
Recurve is a San Francisco / Mill Valley-based climate software company that turns behind-the-meter customer devices - smart thermostats, heat pumps, EV chargers, batteries - into reliable grid resources. Its FLEX platform uses revenue-grade smart-meter data and open-source measurement methods (OpenEEmeter / CalTRACK) to let utilities, regulators and aggregators design, run and verify demand-flexibility programs and pay for performance. In effect, Recurve builds the market plumbing for virtual power plants, so the grid can lean on millions of small homes and businesses instead of a single new gas peaker plant.
Splight
Splight is a grid-technology company that uses machine learning to squeeze more capacity out of the power lines that already exist. Its flagship product, Dynamic Congestion Management (DCM), reads real-time conditions on transmission lines and turns fast-responding assets like batteries and data centers into grid-stabilizing tools, unlocking up to twice the usable capacity without building a single new tower. Founded in 2020 and headquartered in San Francisco, the company targets utilities, grid operators, and the AI data centers straining the grid - it now manages more than 3 gigawatts of grid assets and has raised about $24.4M to expand across North America and Europe.
Last Energy
Last Energy is a US-based developer of factory-built micro modular nuclear power plants. Its flagship PWR-20 is a 20-megawatt pressurized water reactor assembled from truck-shippable modules and delivered as a turnkey, build-own-operate service. Rather than selling reactors, Last Energy sells electricity and heat under long-term power purchase agreements, targeting data centers and energy-intensive industries that need reliable, carbon-free baseload power without financing or operating a plant themselves.
Fernando Llaver
Fernando Llaver is the CEO and Co-Founder of Splight, a San Francisco-based AI company that unlocks hidden transmission capacity on existing electricity grids using machine learning - without building new infrastructure. A veteran of more than two decades in the energy industry, he left a C-level role to co-found Splight in 2021 alongside CTO Thomas Vadora and Chief Data Scientist Carlos Caldart. Splight's Dynamic Congestion Management technology now manages over 6 gigawatts of grid assets across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America, and has raised $28.1M in total funding. Llaver was invited by the International Energy Agency to join global leaders in Paris to discuss energy and AI, and is a member of the Unreasonable Group portfolio of entrepreneurs tackling major global challenges.