A battery chemistry that served spacecraft is getting a second career on the grid. EnerVenue’s harder invention has been the factory that can make it.
The Boulder startup is teaching batteries, refrigerators and microgrids to anticipate the expensive hour. Its pitch is simple: make demand flexible before building more supply.
Aeromine Technologies builds a motionless, bladeless rooftop wind energy system for commercial and industrial buildings. Its 10-foot units sit along a roof's edge and use vertical airfoils to capture and amplify a building's own airflow, generating electricity silently and without spinning blades. The company says the system can produce up to 50% more energy than a comparable rooftop solar array while using roughly 10% of the roof space, and it is designed to complement, not replace, solar. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Houston, Aeromine has run pilots with BASF and BMW Group and raised a ~$9M Series A led by Veriten in 2024.
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.