solar
(10)
Jason Steinberg
Jason Steinberg is the CEO of Scanifly, a drone-based software platform that lets solar companies survey rooftops, build 3D models, run shading analysis, and produce permit-ready designs without repeated site visits or dangerous roof climbs. A CFA charterholder who once installed solar panels on New Jersey rooftops, he spent years financing renewable energy projects at Bloomberg New Energy Finance and CohnReznick Capital before taking the helm at Scanifly in 2018. He hosts the podcast 'When Life Gives You Lumens,' where he digs into how the solar industry can scale through better technology, safety, and workforce development.
Nithish Sairam
Nithish Sairam is the co-founder and CEO of Illumine-i, a solar and power-engineering design firm he built after stints at Tesla and NextEra Energy. Under his leadership the bootstrapped firm expanded from a five-person team to roughly 240 engineers across offices in Fremont, Austin, and Chennai, and has been described as the largest independent digital design engineering firm in the residential PV solar sector.
Jutta Friedrichs
Jutta Friedrichs is a German-born designer and co-founder of Soofa, the Cambridge, MA company that makes solar-powered digital signs for city sidewalks. Before Soofa she ran the MÜ furniture studio in Shanghai, co-founded Xindao's in-house design team, won two Red Dot Awards, an iF Design Award and an Elle Decoration Award, and earned a Masters at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She mentors at the Harvard Innovation Lab and works at the seam of hardware, human-centered design, and the civic public realm.
Adam Silver
Adam Silver is the co-founder and CEO of Plural (Plural Finance / Plural Energy), a San Francisco startup building a financial operating system for energy infrastructure. Plural tokenizes real-world clean energy assets - solar arrays, batteries, and data centers - turning them into programmable, investable products, and runs a FINRA-member broker-dealer with a transfer agent license. A former Deloitte consultant and ServiceNow product lead, Silver became obsessed with what he calls 'the miracle of lights turning on,' then with the unacceptable difficulty of financing the assets behind it. In September 2025 Plural closed an oversubscribed $7.13M seed round led by Paradigm, bringing total funding to roughly $9.3M, with over $300M in distributed solar and battery assets available for investment.
Maryssa Barron
Maryssa Barron is the founder and CEO of BuildQ, an AI-powered project intelligence platform for the energy sector that structures project data, automates due diligence, and accelerates clean energy financing and M&A. A Harvard graduate, Stanford-trained lawyer, and licensed D.C. attorney, she spent nearly a decade in renewable energy - pioneering early power purchase agreements and rising to COO at a global independent power producer - before building the tool she wished had existed. She founded BuildQ in 2024 while studying for the bar exam, won the 2025 AngelNV competition and over $1 million in funding, and within a year had grown the platform to 300+ projects, 10+ gigawatts of clean energy capacity, and over $150 million in deal flow.
Phil Krinner
Phil Krinner is the co-founder and CEO of Arch, a San Francisco company building AI revenue software for home services contractors, starting with HVAC and heat pumps. A Stanford GSB graduate and former McKinsey strategy consultant who once built large-scale solar plants and installed panels himself, Krinner started Arch after asking 15 contractors to quote a heat pump for his apartment and finding that not one could tell him whether it would save money. Arch uses public home data and AI to help contractors find the right homes, size systems in minutes, and run hyper-personalized campaigns. The company raised a $6.2M seed round in 2024 led by Coatue with Floodgate, Gigascale, ReGen and MCJ.
Nicholas Speyer
Nicholas Speyer is the co-founder and CEO of SYSO Technologies, a Boston-based market operations firm that runs renewable and battery storage assets in the wholesale power markets. Under his leadership, SYSO has grown to manage more than 4.5 gigawatts across 300+ sites in every major ISO/RTO market and into Canada, backed by a $15.5M Series B from Kimmeridge, New Energy Capital and MassMutual Ventures. A Stanford-trained energy resources engineer, Speyer spent two decades building energy-software and efficiency businesses before turning SYSO into what its investors call the clear leader in its space.
Jacob Sandry
Jacob Sandry is the co-founder and CEO of Euclid Power, a New York renewable energy operating system that turns scattered solar and storage project documents into decision-ready intelligence. After helping build Goldman Sachs' renewables fund from zero to $3 billion deployed, he left to fix the unglamorous paperwork that quietly stalls clean energy. Euclid now supports more than 21 GW across 1,100+ projects, raised a $20M Series A led by Venrock, and bets that AI plus accountable human experts beats AI alone in an industry where 99% accurate is functionally wrong.
Banks Hunter
Banks Hunter is the co-founder and CEO of Charge Robotics, a Berkeley-based startup building the world's first fully automated solar construction system. An MIT mechanical engineering alumnus and veteran of medical robotics startup Vicarious Surgical, Hunter co-founded Charge Robotics in 2021 with Max Justicz to solve one of clean energy's most stubborn bottlenecks: the physical, labor-intensive grunt work of assembling a utility-scale solar farm. His company's Sunrise system - a portable robotic assembly line shipped directly to job sites - autonomously puts together 800-pound solar bays and deploys them in the field, aiming to make solar installation as repeatable and scalable as factory production. Backed by Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Energy Impact Partners, and Y Combinator, Charge Robotics has raised over $39 million to accelerate the energy transition.
Arch Rao
Arch Rao is the Founder and CEO of SPAN, a San Francisco-based clean energy hardware company that reinvented the home electrical panel. A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer and former Tesla Energy leader who helped launch Powerwall, Powerpack, and SolarCity products, Rao founded SPAN in 2018 with a singular mission: rapidly decarbonize American homes by making the century-old electrical panel smart. SPAN's intelligent panels enable circuit-level control, real-time energy monitoring, solar and battery integration, and grid demand response - turning a neglected utility box into the command center for home electrification. With over $522M in total funding and backing from Wellington Management, Fifth Wall, Robert Downey Jr.'s FootPrint Coalition, and Amazon's Alexa Fund, SPAN is building the grid-edge infrastructure layer for the coming decades of home electrification.