power-electronics
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WelComm sells the “so what” behind the specification
The San Diego agency speaks fluent engineering. Its business is turning complicated electronics into stories that the people buying them have a reason to read.
Brandon Ridley Builds Marketing Teams With an Expiration Date
He began at a soldering bench, built a power-electronics test instrument, and crossed into industrial marketing. Now his pitch to hardware founders is unusually finite: give him six months to build the function, then let him leave.
Mark Granahan Retired. Then He Found a Better Way to Use Silicon.
A retired chip executive went back to the journals, rented time in a university nanofab, and spent seven years proving that ordinary silicon still had another act.
AmberSemi Left the Wall Socket for AI’s Hottest Seat - Right Under the Chip
The Dublin semiconductor startup paused its solid-state circuit-breaker push to chase a nastier bottleneck: moving enormous current into AI processors without wasting it across the motherboard.
The Pennsylvania Startup Betting That Silicon Still Has Room to Run
Everyone said the next leap in power electronics had to come from exotic materials. iDEAL Semiconductor bet it could wring more out of plain silicon - and now its chips are shipping from a Minnesota fab.
The Korean Startup Trying to Shrink the Grid's Heaviest Box
Crocus wants to replace the hundred-year-old iron transformer with a silicon one that thinks. Its bet: the same box that charges electric cars can also keep an AI data center from browning out.
Andrei Iancu Is Teaching Factories to Cut Crystals With Light
The Halo Industries founder turned a Stanford materials problem into a semiconductor manufacturing company. His wager is practical: waste less of the crystal, learn faster on the factory floor, and let better power electronics follow.
The Company Under the Cloud
AI may live in the cloud, but the cloud lives on switchgear, drives and control systems. ABB is the century-old engineering company turning the digital economy's appetite for power into an industrial growth story.
The Tiny Box Behind Every Solar Panel Is Enphase's Big Bet
Enphase turned the least glamorous part of rooftop solar into a platform. Now its panel-level microinverters anchor a connected system for making, storing, using, and selling household power.
Evans Electric Pty Ltd
Evans Electric Pty Ltd is a Sydney-based electric machine developer founded by Paul Evans that designs high torque density axial flux induction motors, integrated eAxles, silicon-carbide motor controllers and electromechanical actuation systems for electric vehicles, aerospace propulsion, heavy equipment and industrial platforms. Its patented double-stator, single-rotor axial air-gap architecture aims to deliver the same performance as conventional motors in roughly a third of the volume.
Scalvy
Scalvy is an Austin-based power electronics company building a modular, software-defined platform called the Power Neuron that distributes power conversion and control to the edge of each battery pack instead of routing it through a single centralized block. The approach targets three power-hungry markets - AI data centers, grid-scale energy storage, and electric mobility - promising higher usable energy, ultra-high efficiency, and faster development cycles. Founded in 2022 by Mohamed Badawy, the company raised a $13.9M Series A in March 2026, bringing total funding to roughly $17M.
Halo Industries, Inc.
Halo Industries is a Santa Clara deep-tech company that uses lasers instead of diamond wire saws to slice silicon carbide crystal boules into wafers, the foundational substrate for high-voltage power electronics. Spun out of Stanford in 2014, its proprietary light-based process aims to eliminate kerf loss, cut defects, and slash water and energy use, giving more usable wafers from every expensive crystal. Backed by an $80M Series B, Halo is scaling SiC production for electric vehicles, grid infrastructure, renewables, and aerospace, and extending the same approach to silicon, sapphire, and diamond.
Mohamed Badawy
Mohamed Badawy is the founder and CEO of Scalvy, an Austin-based hardware startup building modular 'Power Neuron' electronics that replace centralized inverters, chargers and DC-DC converters in electric vehicles, energy storage and AI data centers. A former tenured associate professor at San Jose State University who founded and directed its Center of Power Electronic Converters, he left academia in 2024 to commercialize the modular architecture he had been researching. In March 2026 Scalvy closed a $13.9M Series A co-led by Silicon Badia with Azolla Ventures, Climate Capital and SkyRiver Ventures.
Arno Merkle
Arno Merkle is the co-founder and CEO of Crystal Sonic, a Phoenix deep tech startup whose patented Sonic Lift-Off technology uses sound waves as an 'acoustic scalpel' to split thin device layers off semiconductor wafers so the costly substrate can be reused. A materials scientist with a Ph.D. from Northwestern and more than 75 technical papers to his name, Merkle spent two decades building and exiting X-ray and electron microscopy companies (Xradia, acquired by Carl Zeiss in 2013; XRE, acquired by Tescan in 2018) before turning his attention to one of chipmaking's quietest scandals: that conventional wafering throws away 90% or more of pristine, expensive crystal. With Crystal Sonic he is trying to make next-generation chips cheaper and far less wasteful, one sound wave at a time.
Heron Power
Heron Power is a Scotts Valley, California company building solid-state transformers - power electronics purpose-built for the modern electrical grid. Founded in 2025 by former Tesla powertrain and energy chief Drew Baglino, its flagship Heron Link converts medium-voltage electricity to usable low-voltage power in a modular, software-integrated package, replacing the century-old iron-core transformer. The company targets utility-scale solar, grid-scale batteries, and hyperscale AI data centers, and is building a 40-gigawatt US factory to meet a backlog of orders.
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.
Frenetic
Frenetic is a Madrid-born deep-tech company building AI-powered software and a manufacturing service for custom magnetic components - the unglamorous transformers and inductors at the heart of every power supply, EV charger, and electrified machine. Their platform compresses what used to take months of trial-and-error into days of simulation, and ships physical samples in roughly a week.
Chema Molina
Chema Molina is the CEO and founder of Frenetic, a Madrid-born, San Francisco-based deep-tech company that uses AI to collapse the design time for high-frequency magnetic components from nine months to one week. Holding a PhD in Industrial Electronics from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Molina built Frenetic on the conviction that power electronics — the invisible backbone of EVs, aerospace, and consumer devices — deserved smarter, faster design tools. His platform now serves clients including NASA, GE, Bosch, Infineon, and Thales Alenia Space, and has raised over $19 million in funding, including a $12.3M Series A led by Kibo Ventures in 2023.