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How the Company That Made Korea's First Radio Quietly Became a Software Business
It started by building Korea's first radio in a country still rebuilding from war. Nearly 70 years later, LG's fastest-growing money comes from the software inside the TV, not the TV itself.
Quilt
Quilt is a Redwood City climate-tech company building a software-defined ductless heat pump for room-by-room home heating and cooling. Founded in 2022 by former Google and Nest people, its system pairs an outdoor compressor with slim indoor heads that carry millimeter-wave occupancy sensors, a Quilt Dial thermostat, and an app that ships over-the-air updates so the hardware gets smarter after install. Quilt sells direct-to-consumer through certified installers and has raised $62M across seed, Series A, and Series B rounds to move households off fossil-fuel heating.
Dandelion Energy
Dandelion Energy is an Alphabet (Google X) spinout that designs, installs, and finances residential and multifamily geothermal heating and cooling systems. By drilling ground loops that tap the earth's stable temperature and pairing them with a proprietary heat pump, Dandelion replaces fossil-fuel furnaces and air conditioners with a single all-electric system that cuts home heating and cooling bills while eliminating on-site emissions. The company has grown into the largest home geothermal provider in the U.S., installing thousands of systems and partnering with the nation's largest production homebuilders and multifamily developers to make geothermal a default option for new construction.
Dan Yates
Dan Yates is the CEO and Chairman of Dandelion Energy, the largest residential geothermal company in the United States, a startup spun out of Google X that drills backyard boreholes to heat and cool homes with the steady temperature of the earth. Before geothermal, he co-founded Opower, the energy-efficiency software company he took public in a billion-dollar-plus 2014 IPO and sold to Oracle in 2016. A Harvard computer scientist turned climate operator, Yates describes his own superpower as being 'a terrible loser' and is doggedly betting that 'lukewarm' geothermal becomes a mainstream pillar of the clean-energy transition.
Drew Baglino
Drew Baglino spent 18 years at Tesla building the guts of the electric age - the Model S powertrain, the Powerwall and Megapack, the 4680 battery cell and a clean-sheet 50 GWh factory in Texas. In 2024 he walked away as Senior Vice President of Powertrain and Energy and aimed his next act at the one piece of grid hardware almost nobody had touched in a century: the transformer. His startup, Heron Power, builds software-controlled solid-state transformers and in February 2026 raised a $140 million Series B co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Breakthrough Energy Ventures to build a 40 GW U.S. factory. He also quietly founded a residential heat-pump company, Sadi Thermal Machines.