Before starting to work in the energy industry, Balachandar Ramamurthy was putting astronauts into space. As the chief engineer responsible for flight safety at SpaceX, he took on a “multidisciplinary coordination problem” — one not unlike what the energy industry faces today, turning distributed resources into cohesive grid assets. That’s why in 2023, he became the co-founder and CEO of Critical Loop, a startup that builds modular microgrids for industrial facilities.
“You can see the parallels in how we think about designing and operating these microgrid systems,” he told Latitude Media. “If you think about spacecrafts, you launch them, and you can’t go repair them easily. In the same way, distributed energy assets need to be maintainable [as easily] as possible to be economical.”
Armed with this principle, Critical Loop announced today that it has raised a $26 million Series A funding round, including equity and equipment financing, bringing its total capital raised to $49 million. The round was led by Conifer Infrastructure Partners and Hanover Technology Investment Management, with participation from Climate Capital and Better Ventures, among others.
The company develops energy storage-based microgrids centered on a proprietary “combiner”: a piece of equipment that integrates diverse power sources. This technology enables the microgrid to interface with various battery types, grid connections, and on-site generation sources without requiring custom technical adaptations for each new component. The idea is to make microgrids hardware-agnostic, and as easy to install as plugging them in.
“We’ve built a system that allows us to standardize how you install [microgrids] into industrial facilities, and scale them relatively rapidly, because it’s an extensible system where you can add additional batteries,” Ramamurthy said. Once that’s done, Critical Loop orchestrates the microgrid remotely via software, and coordinates with the utility to flex the facility’s load in real time as needed.
Addressing speed-to-power
With this approach Critical Loop aims to solve the speed-to-power challenge that is becoming core to the U.S. energy system, as a surge in artificial intelligence data centers strains an already-congested grid. While it’s the data centers stuck in long interconnection queues that get the most attention, the bottleneck can also stall other industrial facilities that face load rejection letters from utilities when trying to expand their operations.
For example, Critical Loop partnered with Terawatt Infrastructure, a fleet-charging hub operator that was denied a request for multiple megawatts for two sites it needed to expand; the utility said it wouldn’t be able to provide the power for five years unless the facility ensured load flexibility. Engaging with the utility, Terawatt noted that for the vast majority of the year, the power would be fully available. Capacity would be limited only during specific windows, and even then, the shortfall was just one to a couple of megawatts. Demonstrating it could bridge that need with Critical Loop’s microgrids, TeraWatt was ultimately able to bypass the years-long wait.
“There’s a lot of interest in building super off-grid, gigantic power plants,” Ramamurthy said. “But most of the large loads are going to have some sort of grid tie, and this strategy allows you to have fewer batteries and fewer systems to solve the problem.”
The Critical Loop fine print
Critical Loop offers its microgrids through both energy-as-a-service agreements, where it retains ownership of the assets, and long-term service agreements, where the customer purchases the equipment while Critical Loop provides ongoing remote orchestration and operation.
The company is targeting the industrial midmarket, which includes sectors like industrial and commercial real estate, where there’s a need for energy storage systems ranging from five to 100 megawatt-hours.
Despite still being early-stage, Critical Loop already manages four MWh of permanent storage at San Diego International Airport, alongside a movable fleet of approximately 30 MWh used for critical needs such as emergency utility outages. As a technology-agnostic provider, the company utilizes batteries sourced from six different manufacturers; the individual units range from 250 kilowatts to two MW.
“We’ve deployed about 50 MWh worth of microgrids in the last year alone,” said Ramamurthy. “This year, we are well on our way to deploying at least 50 MWh, with the goal of reaching 100 MWh.”
The latest fundraise will support this expansion, as well as research and development activities, and “making sure the production systems and supply chain work,” he said.
Editor’s note: This story was updated on April 14, 2026, to clarify the example of Critical Loop’s partnership with Terawatt Infrastructure. It was Terawatt that initially engaged with the utility about the fact that the needed power would be fully available for the majority of the year, not Critical Loop. And the two sites in question needed just over four MW, not 10 MW.
