power-grid
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Timothy Barat
Timothy Barat is the co-founder and CEO of Gridware, a San Francisco climate-tech company that builds pole-mounted sensors to detect power grid failures before they cause outages or wildfires. A former electrical lineworker from Victoria, Australia who lived through the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, Barat moved to the United States, earned bachelor's and master's degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley, and founded Gridware in 2020 with Hall Chen and Abdulrahman Bin Omar. His Gridscope device, described as a 'Fitbit for power poles,' listens to the mechanical and electrical signals of the grid to pinpoint hazards. Gridware has raised roughly $97 million to date, including a $55 million Series B in November 2025, and its co-founders were named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 Social Impact list.
Bob Abboud
Bob Abboud (Robert G. Abboud) is a nuclear engineer turned energy-storage executive who runs Beacon Power, the company that keeps spinning carbon-fiber flywheels to steady the U.S. power grid. Trained at Purdue and Northwestern, he cut his teeth researching at Argonne National Laboratory and engineering reactors at ComEd before founding RGA Labs, an Illinois engineering firm, and picking up patents in magnetics and superconducting technology. He also spent nearly a decade in local politics as village president of Barrington Hills and ran for U.S. Congress in Illinois's 16th district in 2008.
Tim Heidel
Tim Heidel is the co-founder and CEO of VEIR, a Massachusetts startup building overhead superconducting transmission lines that can carry five to ten times the power of conventional lines on roughly the same footprint. An MIT-trained electrical engineer who ran the research behind MIT's Future of the Electric Grid study, then steered a portfolio of grid projects at ARPA-E and vetted climate bets at Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Heidel concluded that the grid's biggest bottleneck was transmission itself - too slow, too costly, too ugly to permit. VEIR is his answer: black pipes carrying superconducting tape bathed in liquid nitrogen at -321F, aimed squarely at AI data centers, utilities and renewable developers.
Amit Narayan
Amit Narayan is the Co-Founder and CEO of GridCARE, a Redwood City-based generative AI company that unlocks hidden power grid capacity to slash data center connection timelines from 5-7 years to 6-12 months. A serial entrepreneur with a PhD from UC Berkeley and a B.Tech from IIT Kanpur, he previously founded AutoGrid (acquired by Schneider Electric in 2022) and Berkeley Design Automation (acquired by Mentor Graphics in 2014), and holds 7 U.S. patents across semiconductor design and energy software. GridCARE emerged from stealth in May 2025 with a $13.5M seed round led by Xora and backed by Tom Steyer, Ram Shriram, and Breakthrough Energy, targeting what Narayan calls the defining constraint on AI: immediate access to power.