virtual-power-plant
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Generac
How a generator built in a Wisconsin barn became the machine millions of Americans buy the week after the power goes out - and why Generac now wants a say in the grid itself.
Steve Huang
Steve Huang is the founder and CEO of KiWi New Energy, a Taiwan-born, San Mateo-based startup building what he calls an operating system for global renewable energy. A serial green entrepreneur with more than 15 years across the semiconductor and solar value chain, Huang went from NVIDIA and public silicon-wafer ventures to a near-total collapse when Chinese rivals undercut his micro-inverter business, then rebuilt around an AI-driven energy datacenter that matches clean supply with retail and small-business demand in real time.
Base Power Company
Base Power is an Austin-based energy company that installs large-capacity home batteries and sells electricity to homeowners as a licensed Texas retail electric provider. Founded in 2023 by Zach Dell and Justin Lopas, it pairs whole-home backup with low fixed rates, using its growing fleet of distributed batteries as a virtual power plant that charges when power is cheap and discharges when the grid is strained. The company raised a $1 billion Series C in October 2025 at a $4 billion valuation and is building its own battery factory in Austin to scale nationally.
Emulate Energy
Emulate Energy is a Lund, Sweden cleantech company that builds white-label software turning everyday household devices - EV chargers, heat pumps, home batteries and solar inverters - into a coordinated, grid-ready fleet. Its platform lets utilities, retailers and grid operators connect, control and monetize distributed energy resources: cutting household bills, shaving grid peaks and unlocking flexibility-market revenue without asking customers to change tariffs or behaviour. Founded in 2020 on control-theory research from MIT and Lund University, Emulate runs live programs across Europe and the US.
Jonathan Winer
Jonathan Winer is the co-founder and co-CEO of Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP), a New York-based firm that applies technology to physical infrastructure like power grids, roads, water and digital systems. Backed by Alphabet, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and StepStone, SIP has raised close to $1 billion and incubates operating companies such as virtual power plant Renew Home and grid-flexible data center developer Verrus. Before SIP, Winer ran investments for Alphabet's urban innovation platform Sidewalk Labs, founded the Asian clean-energy fund Nereus, and helped build the private equity business at the D. E. Shaw group. He is known for thematic, first-principles investing in what he calls the 'missing middle' between venture capital and traditional infrastructure.
KiWi New Energy
KiWi New Energy is a Taiwan- and Silicon Valley-based clean energy company building what it calls the operating system for global renewable energy. Rather than manufacturing more solar panels, KiWi focuses on the AI dispatch layer between generation and consumption: its AI-Driven Energy Datacenter (AI-EDC) matches clean supply to multi-site retail and SME demand in real time, aggregating fragmented buyers into virtual demand pools and using blockchain-certified renewable energy certificates to make green power traceable. Its deployments include a rare control-layer integration with Tesla Energy storage for FamilyMart convenience stores in Taiwan, plus customers like Decathlon and Wang Steak. Founded by serial energy entrepreneur Dr. Steve Huang, the company reached breakeven in 2025 and is expanding into Japan and the United States.
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.
Zach Dell
Zach Dell is the co-founder and CEO of Base Power, an Austin battery-and-electricity company he started in 2023 with former SpaceX and Anduril manufacturing leader Justin Lopas. Base sells homeowners a leased backup battery for a one-time $695 plus a $19 monthly membership and retail electricity, then knits those household batteries into a distributed grid that charges on cheap overnight power and discharges at peak. In under three years the company raised a $1 billion Series C at a roughly $4 billion valuation and, by mid-2026, was in talks to raise again near a $12 billion valuation. The son of Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell, Zach traces his energy obsession to college experiments that included trying to lease a Hawaiian lava field for solar and building anaerobic digesters in India.
AGent Energy
AGent Energy (branded AiGent) is a Houston-based energy-tech company that uses AI software and secure hardware to aggregate, orchestrate, and monetize idle backup generators at commercial, industrial, and mission-critical sites. By connecting these behind-the-meter assets to wholesale power markets during peak demand and grid emergencies, AGent turns standby liabilities into dispatchable, revenue-generating distributed power plants - improving grid reliability without building new infrastructure. The company is targeting a roughly 185 GW fleet of existing backup generation across the U.S.
Rahul Kar
Rahul Kar is the founder and CEO of Hammerhead AI, a Redwood City startup that uses reinforcement-learning control agents to squeeze stranded power out of AI data centers. After helping build and scale AutoGrid - the distributed-energy software pioneer acquired by Schneider Electric - Kar launched Hammerhead in November 2025 with a $10M seed round led by Buoyant Ventures. His thesis is blunt: the real bottleneck for AI is not chips or models, it is power, and most data centers run at 30-50% of their allocated capacity. Hammerhead's ORCA platform orchestrates power, cooling, and compute in real time to unlock roughly 30% more usable capacity without touching the grid.
Recurve
Recurve is a San Francisco / Mill Valley-based climate software company that turns behind-the-meter customer devices - smart thermostats, heat pumps, EV chargers, batteries - into reliable grid resources. Its FLEX platform uses revenue-grade smart-meter data and open-source measurement methods (OpenEEmeter / CalTRACK) to let utilities, regulators and aggregators design, run and verify demand-flexibility programs and pay for performance. In effect, Recurve builds the market plumbing for virtual power plants, so the grid can lean on millions of small homes and businesses instead of a single new gas peaker plant.
Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP)
Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP) is an infrastructure developer and holding company that builds and operates businesses reshaping how energy and digital systems work together. Founded inside Alphabet in 2017 and spun out as independent in 2019 by Sidewalk Labs veterans Jonathan Winer and Brian Barlow, SIP raised $400 million in 2020 backed by Alphabet and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan. It identifies bottlenecks in physical infrastructure, then pairs technology with capital to create new operating companies - most recently Renew Home, a roughly one-gigawatt residential virtual power plant, and Verrus, which designs large-scale data centers that flex their grid draw on demand.
SPAN
SPAN builds smart electrical panels that turn the most ignored box in the house into the control center for solar, batteries, EVs and heat pumps. Founded in 2018 by former Tesla Powerwall lead Arch Rao, the company sells to homeowners through installers and to utilities through its SPAN Edge program for grid-edge load management.
Zach Robin
Zach Robin is the CEO of Recurve, a San Francisco-based clean energy software company building the leading demand-side platform for utilities, aggregators, and implementers. A computer scientist turned energy entrepreneur, Zach has spent two decades at the intersection of software and grid modernization — from scaling product at EnerNOC through its Enel acquisition, to co-founding Hatch Data and growing it into North America's top real estate decarbonization platform (acquired by Measurabl), to now leading Recurve's FLEX platform, which manages 54 million meters nationwide and powers performance-based clean energy programs across the country.
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.