smart-grid
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Brian Parsonnet Kept Finding Better Uses for Yesterday’s Data
Across four decades, the Seeq co-founder has pursued one stubborn idea: the machines already know plenty. The useful work begins when people can finally ask them better questions.
Terry Rohrer Spent a Career Teaching the Grid to Listen
From enterprise software to farm pumps and smart thermostats, the Ohio technologist built a career around making scattered machines behave like one dependable power plant.
Brett Burger Makes the Invisible Measurable
For more than two decades at NI, the aerospace engineer turned product marketer has followed one stubborn idea: the best way to explain a machine is to measure something people already care about.
The Software Company Trying to Put Every Utility on One Screen
SEW.AI began by making utility self-service less painful. Now it wants to connect the customer, the field crew and the grid - without asking a century-old industry to rip out everything underneath.
Connected Energy Outlived Its First Big Bet - Then Turned 4,500 Farm Pumps Into a Virtual Power Plant
A Pittsburgh smart-grid company survived the collapse of its original broadband thesis by learning to control the least glamorous machines on the grid. Its reward: a utility software business built around farm pumps, real-time measurement and a newly acquired second act inside CLEAResult.
The Software Company Utilities Call When the Lights Go Out
Milsoft began with a pencil, a calculator and one engineer’s circuit model. Thirty-seven years later, more than 1,000 utilities use its software to find faults, dispatch crews, answer anxious callers and keep the grid’s many databases speaking the same language.
Daniel Lim Is Teaching Electricity to Pay Attention
The Crocus co-founder began with a stubbornly practical question: why collect oceans of energy data if nobody uses them to change what happens next? A decade later, his answer stretches from factory meters to EV chargers and software-controlled transformers.
dcbel’s $9,999 Bet: Your EV Should Run the House
The Montreal company spent a decade turning an electric car into a home battery. Now the hardware is certified, Volvo and Polestar are plugged in, and the hard part has shifted from invention to installation.
Helsinki Killed Coal Without Freezing: Helen's Blueprint for Rebuilding a City While It Runs
A century-old municipal utility retired its last coal plant, cut direct emissions 56% in a year and survived the next hard winter with heat reliability above 99.9%. The useful idea is not one miracle machine - it is a network designed to swallow whatever clean heat source works next.
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.
The Humble Power Meter Is Learning to Think
For 130 years, Landis+Gyr has counted electricity. Its next act is to turn the meter on your wall into a sensor, a computer and a traffic cop for an increasingly unruly grid.
Hitachi
The 1910 mining-repair shop that quietly became the backbone of the world's power grids and railways is now betting its next century on AI you can touch.
Pylon
Pylon is a Cairo-based smart infrastructure platform that sells electricity and water utilities a subscription-based Smart Metering as a Service (SMaaS). Its software layers on top of any meter - old or new - to cut losses, improve revenue collection and give operators real-time visibility, all at zero upfront cost. Founded in 2017 and backed by Y Combinator (S21), Pylon runs across more than a million metering endpoints in Egypt and the Philippines.
SwitchDin
SwitchDin is a Newcastle, Australia-based energy technology company that builds software and edge hardware to make distributed energy resources (DER) - rooftop solar, home and grid batteries, EV chargers and controllable loads - visible, controllable and orchestrable at scale. Its Stormcloud cloud platform and Droplet edge controllers create a common, vendor-neutral language across different brands of inverters and batteries, letting utilities, retailers and network operators run microgrids, virtual power plants and flexible-export programs. Founded in 2014 by Dr Andrew Mears, the company works with major Australian utilities including Horizon Power, Ausgrid, AGL, Origin and Western Power, and helped deliver a world-first renewable-only microgrid run in Onslow, WA.
Sitetracker
Sitetracker is a cloud software company that helps owners and operators of critical infrastructure - telecom towers, fiber and wireless networks, EV chargers, renewable energy sites, utility grids and data centers - plan, build, operate and maintain their assets from a single system of record. Built on the Salesforce platform, its asset lifecycle and deployment operations management software is used by roughly 300 organizations worldwide, including BT, Ericsson, AT&T, Vodafone, Southern Company, RWE, Engie and EVgo, to manage millions of sites and projects representing more than $25 billion in portfolio holdings.
Plentify
Plentify is a South African climate-tech company that builds AI-driven hardware and software to intelligently manage home energy use. Its flagship device, HotBot, is a smart controller for electric water heaters (geysers) that shifts heating to when power is cheaper and cleaner, while its SolarBot companion maximizes solar self-consumption. Founded in 2017 by Jon Kornik and Kailas Nair, Plentify links water heaters, batteries and solar inverters into a coordinated energy platform that cuts household electricity costs and eases pressure on strained grids. The company raised a roughly $15M Series A in 2025 to expand from South Africa into the UK, Australia and Brazil.
Shwan Lamei
Shwan Lamei is co-founder and CEO of Emulate Energy, a Lund- and Boston-based software company that turns everyday household devices - heat pumps, EV chargers, home batteries, solar inverters - into a coordinated 'virtual battery' that utilities can dispatch on flexibility and balancing markets. Trained as an industrial engineer at Lund University, he spent 15 years in industrial B2B sales and corporate development at SWEP and Dover before starting Emulate in 2020 with a childhood friend whose MIT postdoctoral research became the technical seed of the company. In April 2025 Emulate closed a EUR 5M Series A led by Helen Ventures to scale its DER orchestration platform across Scandinavia, the DACH region and the United States.
David Kim
David Kim is the co-founder and CEO of Monterra, a San Francisco software company that helps EV charging contractors and developers design, quote, and propose charging projects in minutes instead of days. Before Monterra, he spent years working with utilities and energy companies designing EV charging programs, deploying smart grid infrastructure, and planning energy efficiency initiatives, with earlier stops at The Cadmus Group, Boston Consulting Group, and Accenture, plus a graduate degree from MIT Sloan. He co-founded Monterra in 2022 with Kelson Reiss and raised a $2.5M pre-seed led by Base10 Partners in November 2023 to speed the buildout of EV charging infrastructure with software and AI.
Chris Black
Chris Black is the CEO of GridX, Inc., an enterprise energy technology platform serving major US utilities. With nearly 30 years in technology and operations, he has been a central figure in the clean energy software sector - as CTO/COO at Tendril, he orchestrated the acquisitions that formed Uplight (now valued at $1.5B+), then invested via Huck Capital before taking the helm at GridX in April 2022 during its $40M Series C round. Under his leadership, GridX calculates 49 million bills daily, serves 40 million meters under contract, and models 1,000+ tariffs for utilities including PG&E, Southern California Edison, and ComEd.
Amy Hurlbut
Amy Hurlbut is Executive Vice President of Software Engineering at Salesforce, where she leads the Hyperforce initiative - the company's next-generation public cloud infrastructure platform handling tens of billions of transactions daily. A Harvard and Stanford-trained engineer with over 35 years in tech, she spent 23 years at Echelon Corporation before joining Salesforce in 2013, rising steadily from Senior Director to EVP. Recognized by Girl Geek X as one of '60 Engineering Leaders to Watch in 2020,' she is a quiet force behind some of the most consequential infrastructure work in enterprise software.