home-electrification
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Christopher Kemper Built a Clean-Energy Company. Now He’s Sharing the Scar Tissue.
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.
Zack Schmitz
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.
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.
Arch Rao
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
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.