Zach
Robin

The Grid Whisperer

Zach Robin arrived at Recurve in May 2024 with a specific kind of credibility: he'd already done this once. As co-founder and CEO of Hatch Data, he'd turned a spinout from EnerNOC's Energy Intelligence Software division into North America's top commercial real estate decarbonization platform - 250 customers, 350 million square feet of property, 14 billion hours of operational building data on day one. When Measurabl acquired it, Zach moved over as SVP of Business Strategy, long enough to know he wanted to build something again.

The company he stepped into at Recurve had already built something remarkable - a decade of foundational work under founder Matt Golden, an open-source measurement toolkit trusted by the California Public Utilities Commission, and the infrastructure for what was about to become FLEX, a demand-side management platform unlike anything utilities had used before. What it needed was an operator.

Zach is that operator. Vanderbilt computer science graduate. Michigan MBA and M.S. holder. A career arc that began at Sun Microsystems in the early 2000s and bent steadily toward the question he's been answering ever since: how do you make buildings and homes into active participants in the electrical grid, not just passive consumers?

What FLEX Actually Does

The demand side of the electrical grid has always had a measurement problem. Energy efficiency programs saved kilowatt-hours, demand response programs dispatched flexibility, electrification programs loaded up new devices - but nobody could prove exactly how much, when, or for whom. Utilities and regulators were essentially flying on instruments that didn't trust each other.

Recurve's FLEX platform changes the accounting. It manages energy data across the full lifecycle of a demand-side program - targeting the right customers, forecasting their impact, executing the program, and then settling the results with numbers that can survive regulatory scrutiny. In an industry where "program impact" has historically been a negotiated estimate, that's a significant shift.

The proof is in the numbers Zach cited in his September 2025 CEO letter: one major utility managing a $70 million portfolio transparently across multiple aggregators. Programs averaging a 102% realization rate - beating their own projections. Projects scaled from under 100 to over 800, with tripled participation in underserved communities. Those are not marketing claims. They're the kind of metrics that get regulators to call back.

Built for This

Start with the degree: B.S. in Computer Science from Vanderbilt. That's an unusual foundation for a clean energy executive, and it shows. Zach thinks in systems - data pipelines, measurement protocols, software architectures. When he joined EnerNOC in 2010 as a senior business development manager, energy companies were just beginning to figure out that software could run their programs. He helped build the case.

By 2013 he was running EnerNOC's Smart Buildings Group as General Manager, overseeing the product work that would eventually define the company's commercial real estate offering. When EnerNOC went to Enel in 2018, Zach went with it - briefly, as Head of Product at Enel X - before realizing the most interesting thing he could do was start something new.

Hatch Data was the result. Launched in January 2020 - right before the world got complicated - as a spinout from the Energy Intelligence Software business he'd helped build. The timing was absurd. The execution was not. Within months, they had 250 commercial real estate clients. The platform analyzed streaming data from building automation systems, meters, and work orders, surfacing performance issues across portfolios that had previously required armies of engineers to identify. Beacon Capital. Boston Properties. Hines. Real names, real portfolios.

Measurabl acquired Hatch Data, and Zach spent a stint as SVP of Business Strategy before looking for his next move. The call from Recurve made sense. Here was a company with a decade of hard-won technical credibility, an open-source toolkit that had already shaped California's grid policy, and a platform - FLEX - that needed the kind of commercial and operational scaling he'd done before.

54 Million Meters and Counting

The pitch for virtual power plants - aggregating thousands of homes and buildings to respond to grid stress like a single generating unit - has been around for a decade. The execution has been less consistent. The basic challenge is accountability: if you tell a utility that 40,000 households reduced their consumption by 300 megawatts on a hot Tuesday afternoon, they need to believe that number. Their regulators need to believe that number.

Zach's thesis is that the software layer - the measurement, verification, and program management infrastructure - has been the missing piece. Generation-side grid assets are measured precisely. Demand-side assets have historically been estimated, negotiated, and averaged. FLEX is built to close that gap.

The October 2025 raise - $12.6 million from existing investors including Quantum Capital Group - is specifically earmarked to scale a platform that's, in Zach's words, "already working." The goal isn't to prove the technology. It's to get FLEX in front of the utilities, community choice aggregators, and program implementers who are accountable for results they can't currently measure with confidence.

RMI, one of the most influential energy think tanks in the country, brought Recurve into its Virtual Power Plant Partnership alongside Kraken and Voltus. That's not a coincidence. The institutions that shape how the grid evolves are paying attention to what Recurve is building - and to the CEO who showed up to make it scale.

The Scorecard

How He Got Here

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