Energy Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2025

About Oklo Inc.: Oklo Inc. (Oklo) is developing advanced fission power plants to provide emission-free, reliable, and affordable energy. Oklo received a Site Use Permit from the U.S Department of Energy, has performed successful prototypic fuel fabrication, was awarded fuel material from Idaho National Laboratory, developed the first advanced fission combined license application accepted and docketed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and is developing advanced fuel recycling technologies in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy and national laboratories. Oklo has been featured in Time, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Popular Mechanics, Wired, Architectural Digest, Hyperallergic, POWER Magazine, has been the subject of a Harvard Business School case, and is featured in the Oliver Stone documentary Nuclear, among other features.

Reach Labs is building long-range wireless power networks that deliver scalable, resilient energy infrastructure.

Statiq connects electric vehicle owners to EV chargers. EV owners can discover chargers near them, pre-book a slot and pay for the usage conveniently. Property owners can buy, share their chargers, manage them and earn by becoming charger hosts with Statiq. Our EV chargers can be found at shopping malls, workplaces, restaurants , hotels, residential spaces.

Phoenix Hydrogen is building the first commodity marketplace for hydrogen. This year, $9.5B in federal grants will fund the first hydrogen grids, but this ecosystem has no marketplace. We’re uniquely able to build one because we’re already working with big utilities on a fulfillment platform: a 1000'-tall underground warehouse for hydrogen.

Gridware exists to enhance and protect the mother of all networks: the electrical grid. The grid touches everyone and makes our modern economy possible. But it’s also fragile. When the grid is compromised, 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 builds smart sensors that help utility companies to immediately detect, find, and fix outages and take steps to prevent new outages, and other related disasters, from happening at all. The need 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.

Evoly makes smart electric & water meters. We save a typical utility over $4M a year. Electric and water meter measure your consumption, A smart meter on the other hand not only measure it, it also send this consumption data and a lot more remotely and wirelessly to the utility. We are a plug and play, easy to install, 5 times cheaper smart metering solution. We are a B2B company and our customer are the Utilities Thanks to our software they get 24/7 view on their grid and a wide range of possibilities : - Remote meter reading - Detecting fraud - Turning electricity on and off remotely - Time of use pricing

Every battery company spends tens of millions of dollars a year on experiments. Simulations that replace experiments reduce these costs but are currently underutilized in industry because they are hard to create and run. We make simulations accessible to every engineer, by helping them to create models from their own data, then run large scale simulations in the cloud to explore the full design space.

Maverick BioMetals is a biotechnology company advancing lithium processing. The company was founded by Eric Herrera, former Department of Defense scientist, and Jesse Evans, former startup operations manager. We've developed a biological process to efficiently extract lithium from hard rock deposits. Our custom process is greener, more energy efficient, and cost effective compared to the current methods of extracting lithium. We're currently developing partnerships with mining companies to further the commercialization of our technology.

SINAI Technologies is an enterprise software that helps carbon-intensive companies to price carbon emissions, manage carbon taxes, and reduce emissions in the most cost-effective way.

EV charging infrastructure today is expensive, difficult to install, and doesn't integrate well with existing products, services, and businesses. HeyCharge solves all of these problems with ultra-low-cost, plug-and-play EV chargers that don't require internet connections and integrate with third-party products via our SDK and APIs. Our customers are energy utilities, property operators, mobility service providers, and more.

Byterat is a modern data platform for battery science, purpose-built to help battery teams innovate, securely and at scale.

Bright is Mexico’s #1 residential solar provider (think Sunrun for the developing world, starting first in Mexico). We provide the financing and software that enable thousands of student ambassadors and retail promoters to offer cheaper electricity to homes at no upfront cost, and we work with our network of hundreds of local installers and distributors to satisfy the resulting demand. Our first market is Mexico, which has more sun, higher electricity rates, and lower labor costs than the US. Bright's investors include First Round Capital, Y Combinator, and other top Silicon Valley firms.

We are a sensor company that aims to accurately capture the behavior of high throughput fluid systems. With this information we can help improve operations while reducing spills and theft. This technology could change the way the oil and gas industry, water municipalities, and anyone dealing with high volume fluid, operates. Fleets of our proprietary lightweight hardware send raw ultrasonic data directly to our server via cellular/satellite; we then use a mix of physics equations, signal processing, and anomaly detection to determine the behavior of fluid (volume and speed) in pipes.

Dartboard is an AI Analyst for Electricity Markets, starting with the owners of grid-connected battery projects.

Batteries have a big role to play in tackling the climate crisis, and it’s essential to make sure that they’re safe and reliable to operate. At Zitara, we build cutting-edge software solutions that empower companies to deeply understand their batteries, both in design and deployment. It’s all part of our work to enable a renewable energy revolution, powered by safer batteries, at a lower cost, with less waste.

We remove CO2 and water from the air and use electricity from solar and wind power to turn them into zero net carbon electrofuels. These are gasoline, diesel, and jet fuels that work in existing cars, trucks and planes without requiring modification of their engines, and don't contribute to global warming because they don't add any new CO2 to the atmosphere. Each gallon of our electrofuels means a gallon of fossil oil left in the ground forever. Importantly, these fuels for the first time can compete with fossil fuels on price - our zero net carbon jet fuel has a price of one cent per gallon less than fossil jet fuel. American Airlines ordered 10 million gallons of this fuel and we will start shipping it next year.

Starlight Charging offers ultra-low-cost EV-charging to condos and apartments. Our power-balancing software enables our network of installers to install chargers without expensive infrastructure upgrades, cutting the cost by 10x compared to any other option. Through Starlight's Partner Program, electricians and small business owners can create their own charging network and generate passive income with owner-operated charging stations using Starlight battle-tested software.

Validere is a measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) SaaS company that helps energy organizations transform disconnected, incomplete data into clear and immediately actionable pathways to financial and environmental value. Over 50 of North America's leading energy companies rely on Validere's technology and multidisciplinary experts to understand their physical and environmental commodities and navigate an increasingly complex environment with clarity and ease. Validere is on a mission to better human prosperity by making the energy supply chain efficient and sustainable. The company has offices in Houston, Calgary, and Toronto.

Astro uses predictive models to identify and secure the best renewable energy sites, focusing on locations with minimal grid upgrade costs and high interconnection success rates. We streamline early-stage development to create shovel-ready projects for larger developers.

Maritime Fusion is building HTS (high-temperature superconducting) fusion reactors for defense and commercial shipping applications. Breakeven fusion is coming soon, but the first-of-a-kind (FOAK) reactors will be costly, high maintenance, and have low capacity factors, leading to 5–10x higher electricity cost on the grid. Maritime Fusion is pursuing the most widely accepted approach to fusion, the tokamak, but specifically designed for the marine environment where the challenges that arise between breakeven and a commercially viable energy source are alleviated. The market we're targeting requires 15x less power, lower up-time, and costs the same as alternative fuels but without any emissions. Since fusion does not use highly radioactive fuels or materials – unlike fission – we sidestep the vast majority of regulatory challenges and safety risks associated with nuclear energy. Our team brings over a decade of industry and research experience in plasma physics, nuclear engineering, and electrical engineering with backgrounds at SpaceX, Tesla, Columbia University, and University of Pennsylvania.

Enode’s APIs enable you to instantly connect users’ energy devices — including EVs, solar inverters, home batteries and thermostats — to your app.

Rewbi uses AI to optimize grid-connected battery storage. We generate revenue by charging when electricity is cheap and discharging when electricity is expensive. We rent battery storage for a fixed fee per month, and we earn 2x that fee in monthly revenue by dispatching the battery optimally. Today, power companies use human traders to manually track grid conditions and update the battery’s dispatch schedule. However batteries can adjust their power output 100x faster than traditional power generation (e.g. hydro, coal, nuclear, gas), with the ability to go from full-speed charging to to full speed discharging in under a minute. Electricity prices change every 5 minutes, often by 300% or more. Our AI better tracks 100s of live inputs, and it makes decisions faster than a human operator (with lower overhead!), improving revenue 2x.

Founded in 2022, Keeling Labs was started as a place to develop and apply machine learning to solve the world's biggest problem—climate change. Our current priority is getting the grid to run on 100% clean energy, which is currently limited by battery storage (specifically, the algorithms that control them). We're redefining these algorithms to unlock gigawatts of untapped energy storage capacity, enabling the grid to run on more clean energy from wind and solar.

Vista designs, finances, installs, and manages energy storage and solar at commercial, industrial, and multifamily properties for $0 upfront, helping businesses save up to 30% on their energy bills. The founding team previously worked at SpaceX, Rocket Lab, NASA and Firefly.

Kitekraft systems consist of a tethered electric aircraft, a.k.a. a kite. The kite has 8 onboard (flying) wind turbines. It autonomously flies in figure eights and generates electrical energy from the wind. Our systems need 10x less construction materials compared to a conventional wind turbine and our systems cost half as much.

Helion is creating the world’s first fusion power plant, enabling a future with unlimited zero-carbon electricity.

Kapacity.io is building the future of smart energy grids with an electricity Load Balancing service focused on buildings.

We make Air Purifier and filters that is certified to eliminate COVID-19 and most other viruses and bacteria. Our technology is independently lab tested, EPA certified and FDA registered. Our air purifiers are already found in homes, businesses and government facilities around the world to help protect their customers and employees from airborne pathogens.

Oolu was founded by Nilmi Senaratna and Dan Rosa in 2015. The company's mission is to provide off-grid households in rural regions in Africa with high quality products at an affordable price. In Wolof, a national language of Senegal, Oolu means ‘trust.’

We use machine learning to accurately forecast electricity prices. Our live customers, including Enel, use our software to improve revenue by millions of dollars per year.

MineralSoft is the leading solution for mineral rights and royalty management. Are you looking for a better way to manage your minerals? Whether you're an investment fund, a family office, an individual, or an advisor, MineralSoft has a tailored solution for you. We combine industry-leading software with experienced, professional service to maximize the value of your assets. Save time, make money, and get peace of mind by managing your oil & gas interests with MineralSoft.