A Pasadena public affairs firm brings campaign organizers to census calls, airbag recalls and kitchen-table paperwork. Its most useful lesson: getting someone’s attention is only the beginning.
Buying solar means comparing equipment, financing and promises about the next 25 years. EnergySage built a business by putting those promises on the same page - and now wants to do the same for the rest of the electric home.

From baseball cards at eight to billions in clean-energy financing, Palmetto’s founder has spent 15 years turning climate conviction into infrastructure - and keeping unusually candid notes on the cost.
Palmetto owns the solar panels. You get the power. Inside the Charlotte software company betting that clean energy should work like a subscription - and raising billions to prove it.
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.
Coral is a New York-based climate fintech that lets HVAC and electrical contractors turn complex government and utility rebates into instant, upfront discounts at the point of sale. Its AI-powered platform verifies rebate eligibility on the spot, files the paperwork directly with programs, and advances the rebate funds - typically within one business day - so homeowners can knock thousands off a heat pump install at the kitchen table. Coral raised a $7.5M seed round in March 2026 and works with 100+ installers across the Northeast.
Zack Schmitz is the co-founder and CEO of Public Grid, a renewable-energy platform that lets apartment renters switch to 100% clean electricity through their existing utility account at no added cost. A former Deloitte consultant with an MIT master's spanning electrical engineering and human-centered design, he built Public Grid (formerly Cottage Energy) to attack the unglamorous middle of the energy market: the roughly 20 million U.S. renters in deregulated states who never get a say in where their power comes from. The platform brokers clean energy in bulk, splits the savings, and follows residents from address to address.
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 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.
Impulse Labs makes the world's most powerful induction cooktop - a $6,999 battery-integrated stove that boils a liter of water in under 40 seconds and doubles as backup power for your kitchen. Founded in 2021 by ex-Oculus product architect Sam D'Amico, the San Francisco company wants every appliance in your home to become a grid-friendly battery.

SPAN builds smart electrical panels that turn the most ignored box in the house into the control center for solar, batteries, EVs and heat pumps. Founded in 2018 by former Tesla Powerwall lead Arch Rao, the company sells to homeowners through installers and to utilities through its SPAN Edge program for grid-edge load management.
Arch Rao is the Founder and CEO of SPAN, a San Francisco-based clean energy hardware company that reinvented the home electrical panel. A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer and former Tesla Energy leader who helped launch Powerwall, Powerpack, and SolarCity products, Rao founded SPAN in 2018 with a singular mission: rapidly decarbonize American homes by making the century-old electrical panel smart. SPAN's intelligent panels enable circuit-level control, real-time energy monitoring, solar and battery integration, and grid demand response - turning a neglected utility box into the command center for home electrification. With over $522M in total funding and backing from Wellington Management, Fifth Wall, Robert Downey Jr.'s FootPrint Coalition, and Amazon's Alexa Fund, SPAN is building the grid-edge infrastructure layer for the coming decades of home electrification.

Sam D'Amico is the founder and CEO of Impulse Labs, a San Francisco-based startup building the world's most powerful and precise home appliances. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer who cut his teeth writing battery firmware for a solar car, then spent a decade building AR/VR hardware at Google Glass, Oculus, and Meta, D'Amico founded Impulse in 2021 after eating a pizza in 45 seconds at a wood-fired restaurant in Tokyo and deciding he needed to bring that power home. The result: a $5,999 battery-integrated induction cooktop that plugs into a standard outlet, boils a liter of water in under 40 seconds, and moonlights as a distributed grid storage node. Impulse has raised $25 million from Lux Capital, Fifth Wall, Lachy Groom, and Construct Capital.