Critical Loop is an industrial power company founded in 2023 by former SpaceX, Tesla and Palantir engineers. It deploys modular, relocatable battery-storage microgrids - paired with its software-defined controller, Cygnus - to give factories, data centers, airports and other grid-constrained sites reliable power in weeks instead of waiting years for utility upgrades. The company raised a $26M Series A in April 2026, bringing total committed funding to $49M, and operates a fleet of control nodes across California.
Panthalassa is a Portland, Oregon public-benefit corporation building autonomous, mass-produced floating nodes that harvest wave energy in the open ocean and use it on the spot to run AI compute, beaming inference results back to land by satellite. Founded in 2016, the company raised a $140M Series B in May 2026 led by Peter Thiel to finish its pilot manufacturing facility and deploy its Ocean-3 node series.
Equilibrium Energy is a San Francisco-based clean power company building PowerOS, an agentic AI platform purpose-built for the power industry. Its flagship product, EQ Mission Control, optimizes battery storage and renewables portfolios across US power markets, blending grid physics, market modeling, and AI copilots.
Rajesh Swaminathan is a Partner at Khosla Ventures, where he backs bold founders reinventing how the world powers, builds, and heals itself. With two decades of deep-tech investing experience spanning Bell Labs, Deutsche Bank, Applied Materials' venture arm, and now one of Silicon Valley's most storied VC firms, he leads investments across renewables, industrial decarbonization, advanced manufacturing, critical minerals, compute infrastructure, and the intersection of all of these with AI. A chemical engineer by training who was awarded the President of India Medal at IIT Madras and later earned an MBA from Harvard, Rajesh brings rare depth - scientific rigor, financial discipline, and operational empathy - to backing the founders who will, as he puts it, 'save the world.'
John Mern is the Co-Founder and CEO of Terra AI, a Khosla Ventures-backed startup using generative AI and probabilistic modeling to transform how humans find and develop critical minerals and energy resources underground. A Stanford PhD in aerospace engineering and alumnus of Boeing Phantom Works and KoBold Metals, Mern built Terra AI's platform to cut mine development timelines in half - running geophysical simulations 125,000x faster than traditional methods, achieving 40% reductions in drilling costs, and helping partners unlock over $100 million in investments. His work sits at the intersection of deep reinforcement learning, geoscience, and the urgent global race to secure the copper, lithium, and cobalt the energy transition demands.