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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.