vehicle-to-grid
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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.
Enteligent
Enteligent is a Morgan Hill, California startup building DC-to-DC power electronics that skip the wasteful AC conversion steps between solar panels, batteries, and the things that consume electricity. Its flagship products are the world's first solar-powered DC-to-DC bidirectional EV charger and the NMax module-level power optimizer for rooftop solar, and it is extending the same direct-current approach to AI data center racks. The pitch is simple arithmetic: keep electricity in DC form from generation to load and you lose less of it, which means faster charging, cheaper installs, and higher solar yields.
Zūm
Zūm is a Redwood City, California company that has reinvented the most analog corner of education: the yellow school bus. It pairs an AI-driven routing and fleet-management platform with apps for parents, drivers and districts, then layers on a fast-growing fleet of electric buses with vehicle-to-grid charging that can sell power back to the grid. Serving roughly 4,500 schools and districts nationwide, Zūm turned a clipboard-and-radio industry into a connected, electrified mobility network.
Ritu Narayan
Ritu Narayan is the founder and CEO of Zūm, the Redwood City company rebuilding the United States' largest mass transit system: the yellow school bus. After 15 years as a product leader at eBay, Yahoo, Oracle and IBM, she left to fix the unreliable rides she was juggling for her own kids. Today Zūm runs electric school bus fleets for more than 4,000 schools, deployed the nation's first all-electric district fleet in Oakland with vehicle-to-grid technology, and has raised about $577 million.