Top Utilities Startups in 2026

Gridware exists to enhance and protect the mother of all networks: the electrical grid. The grid touches everything grinds to a halt, and the consequences can be dire: wildfires burn, land is destroyed, property is damaged, progress stops, and lives are lost. Our team engineers an advanced sensing system to continuously analyze both the electrical and mechanical behavior of grid assets. Utilizing high precision sensor arrays, the system identifies and allows preemptive mitigation of faults. Our technology has been proven with utilities to bolster safety, reliability, and reduce customer outage durations. The demand for power will only increase. We protect the grid of today while we build the grid of tomorrow. Gridware is privately held and backed by the best climate-tech and Silicon Valley investors. We are headquartered in the Bay Area in northern California.

Amperon is the leading analytics and forecasting company for the energy transition. We are venture-backed with support from leading venture and strategic investors who deeply understand energy and software. We are experiencing rapid growth on the back of a killer product that delivers compelling value for energy market participants on both the supply (power & utilities companies) and demand (large energy users) sides of the market. The company is 6 years old, with co-founders that have fused the best-of-breed from the energy (power trader at leading power generators and financials) and technology (data science and engineering at scaling tech companies) industries into a high-performance culture, with the following core values: • We fill in the blanks • We are reliable • We are customer-aligned • We are relentless • We do the hard things • We stay curious The company’s headquarters is Houston, TX, the energy transition capital of the world, but we operate as a highly effective distributed team, spread across the globe.

Seeq makes data analytics software for a big market that’s often overlooked by tech companies: industrial process data. Think pharmaceutical manufacturers, wind farms, and energy companies with tons of equipment and sensors. Our software engineers tackle hard problems in streaming calculation, storage, and distributed computing, leveraging the latest features in Java 11, Kotlin, and PostgreSQL.

Epic Cleantec ("Epic") is a full-service water reuse firm based in San Francisco, CA. We provide turnkey water treatment and reuse systems for customers, creating a one-stop-shop for design, engineering, permitting, construction support, and ongoing operations. Our team has decades of experience across the wastewater and built environment value chain, with expertise in wastewater treatment and solids handling technology, project financing, policy, and operations. Epic deploys onsite water treatment and reuse systems into individual buildings or groups of buildings, converting building wastewater into treated water for non-potable applications, natural soil amendments, and recovered wastewater heat energy. The Epic system can help a project reduce its water demand by up to 95%, which saves owners hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on their water and sewer bills. Born out of initial work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's "Reinvent the Toilet Challenge," Epic reduces the cost and complexity of onsite wastewater treatment and reuse, lowering costs for building owners, easing strain on municipal utilities, and strengthening sustainability and resiliency efforts. Epic has been featured widely in prominent publications (The New York Times, FastCompany, Inc. Magazine, NBC Bay Area, TechCrunch) and was most recently named a Fast Company 2021 World Changing Ideas Award honoree in two categories - Urban Design and Spaces, Places, and Cities.

Toonimo offers a cloud based platform that enables businesses to showcase the key features of their websites by acting as a pathfinder to site visitors. Using customized rich content and natural language, website visitors are intelligently guided by delivering assistance at the right time. This generates an increase in website usability and depending on the business objective can effectively: encourage self-service, increase conversion rates and increase engagement with visitors to your site. Driven by an intelligent decision engine, the platform helps fulfill the purpose of a website – to better service visitors.

Tetra is leading the clean energy transformation by adding transparency and efficiency into a forgotten industry. Home improvement contractors are left in the past, lacking automation and technology to run and scale their small business. This leaves homeowners without the necessary information to make easy, fast decisions and creates a painful buying process. Homeowners are unaware they can reduce carbon emissions and lower their utility bills. We provide the most efficient and affordable options to homeowners, improve their experience, and coordinate the installation of home improvement projects. In doing so, we're “super powering” contractors by automating admin tasks and allowing them to focus on installation excellence and customer happiness. We’re starting by transforming heating and cooling replacements, a $120 billion industry which makes up 12% of total energy usage in the US. Federal and state government agencies allocate billions of dollars in incentives to help homeowners choose high-efficiency systems—now at unprecedented levels thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022—but the dollars are historically underutilized due to lack of customer awareness. We’re democratizing and unlocking those incentive dollars. We started in Massachusetts, where we’re now 4%+ of the heat pump replacement market, and launched in New York in mid-2024, where we’re already seeing great traction, validating that our model has the potential to scale nationwide. With backing from the likes of Lerer Hippeau, Gutter Capital, Greycroft, and others, we’re now preparing to do exactly that.

We empower utilities and smart cities to design and deploy state-of-the-art technology like: - ADVANCED METERING INFRASTRUCTURE - TRANSMISSION & DISTRIBUTION ENGINEERING DESIGN - SMART PARKING INNOVATION

Enervee® is a commerce platform for promoting energy efficient product / rebates. Governments use our platform to monitor compliance, develop rebate programs, and analyze the efficacy of their efforts. Utilities incorporate our platform into their energy efficiency programs to support consumer rebate initiatives and use us to market / scale their efforts. And, consumers use our platform to evaluate product and redeem rebates. We work with electric utilities, governments and retailers to incentive the biggest energy saving products by analyzing prices, sales popularity and energy use for over 50,000 products.

Buzz Solutions provides solutions for automating the process of power line inspection using data collection from drones as well as fault detection using our proprietary AI software platform with predictive analytics and insights. By using our product, the utilities can do frequent inspections in a cost-effective way, prevent power outages and wildfires. Our approach through automation allows the utilities to reduce current costs by at least 50%, prevent power outages, prevent wildfires and manage their assets in an effective way.

Plurilock provides identity-centric cybersecurity for today’s workforces. The Plurilock family of companies enables organizations to operate safely and securely while reducing cybersecurity friction. Plurilock offers world-class IT and cybersecurity solutions through its Solutions Division, paired with proprietary, AI-driven and cloud-friendly security through its Technology Division. Together, the Plurilock family of companies delivers persistent identity assurance with unmatched ease of use.