Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Climate companies are winning. Trillions in capital are shifting to solutions that cut carbon, grow profits, and redefine modern life. At the center are CEOs, founders, and operators turning climate innovation into market momentum.
Hosted by climate-tech founder and author Josh Dorfman, Supercool goes inside their strategies, execution, and business models to reveal how value is created in the race to decarbonize—and how the future is being built.
Welcome to Super Cool, the show about low carbon innovations now scaling. Each week, we talk with the founders, CEOs, and executives whose companies are winning customers, growing revenue, and capturing market share by turning carbon cutting ideas into competitive advantage. This is the rise of the low carbon economy, a multitrillion dollar transformation already underway. I'm your host, Josh Dorfman. The beautiful thing about the clean energy transition is that it's increasingly beautiful.
Speaker 1:That no longer applies just to the sculpted lines of a Rivian or a Tesla, Cybertruck excluded, of course. Now it's in the domain of the technologies and products that are increasingly electrifying our homes. In episode 68, I spoke with Paul Lambert of Quilt, whose company makes modern ductless mini split systems for homes, the first to offer over the air software updates so they continue to improve after purchase. In episode 57, I spoke with Sam Kalish of Copper, whose company makes contemporary induction ranges with integrated batteries so they plug into the same outlet as your toaster. No electrical upgrade needed.
Speaker 1:Lunar is doing the same for battery storage. Its batteries stack vertically on the side of your house and make a stunning design statement, turning your home into a mini power plant that isn't just super awesome, it also looks super sleek. It's the kind of design first approach that takes a product from early adopters excited about tech to mainstream customers excited to show it off to their envious neighbors. Lunar system optimizes energy use, manages homes, appliances, and chargers, saves homeowners money, and turns your home into a key grid asset. Kunal Gurotra served as head of Tesla Energy before leaving to found Lunar in 2020.
Speaker 1:Then he went silent for two years. He raised $300,000,000, assembled a 250 person team, and built the hardware and AI software all in stealth. When Lunar publicly launched in 2022, the startup wasn't announcing a tech roadmap. It was putting a state of the art product in market. What differentiates Lunar from other battery companies in an increasingly competitive space is that it's both a hardware and a software company.
Speaker 1:Most companies do one or the other. They build great batteries and partner for software or they build software platforms that work with anyone's hardware. LUNAR integrates them. The AI is specifically for the systems it controls. Learning each home's unique energy fingerprint and determining when to charge from the grid at low cost, when to run on batteries, and when to sell power back at premium rates.
Speaker 1:That integration delivers meaningful results. Customers earn an average of $464 per year from participation in virtual power plant programs, and Lunar's software saves an additional $338 through energy optimization. That's over $800 annually, plus backup power during outages. On the utility side, Lunar's grid share software now manages 650 megawatts of distributed energy. Lunar batteries, competitor batteries, EVs across multiple continents orchestrating them into virtual power plants for utilities.
Speaker 1:This morning, as this episode publishes, Lunar announced $232,000,000 in new funding, a $102,000,000 series d led by B Capital and Prelude Ventures, plus a previously unannounced $130,000,000 series c led by Activate Capital. The funds will be used to expand Lunar's work with utilities and now scale its battery systems nationwide. Here's my conversation with Kunal. Kunal, welcome to Super Cool.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Josh. I'm excited to be here.
Speaker 1:Okay. So Lunar is founded with a mission to power homes around the world with endless clean energy. You start the company in 2020. You've spent time at Tesla, which I wanna talk about. But I wanna fast forward to this moment because I was looking into, okay, how did Kanal raise capital?
Speaker 1:What was that like? And as I'm going back through the history and seeing, okay, 2022, you come out of stealth. You announce a $300,000,000 round. You've got Sunrun and SK Group out of South Korea as your backers. You already have 250 employees.
Speaker 1:What the heck was that moment like to come out of stealth announcing, hey. We've got $300,000,000 in the bank. We've got a team of 250 people. Take me back to that moment, some of the early journey.
Speaker 2:Yes. That was a great moment. When you start a company, you just wanna focus and make sure that you're building the right team. So when we started the company in 2020, we were focused in not announcing because announcing too ahead of its time is not helpful. We got busy in 2020, focused on hiring a great team and focusing on our mission is to build great hardware and software, which we'll talk about what they do for people's homes.
Speaker 2:And then there comes a time where it's helpful to announce before the product launch. So it was a surprise to a lot of people, and it was great to come out of Stealth and announce our wonderful investors as well as tell people what we're actually doing. So, yeah, that was intentional to be in stealth, and it was a great moment to tell people what exactly we were doing. Today is round two of telling people a bit more about what we're doing, and I'm excited to share all that with you and give you a sneak peek.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. So the customer value proposition, you know, just even on the Lunar site. I mean, it's very clear it's upfront. Make money, avoid grid outages, and power your life with clean energy day and night. That seems extremely compelling to me.
Speaker 1:To deliver on that, of course, has a lot of complexity. Let's dig in and let's start with the product philosophy and how you approach what you're doing with Lunar.
Speaker 2:You described our mission really well. To achieve our mission of powering the homes around with endless, affordable, clean energy, we build great hardware for the home, which is a really neatly designed and integrated solar storage load control system that is installed in people's homes. It generates its own power, stores the power, and through intelligent AI based software decides where that energy should go to achieve all the benefits you mentioned about saving the most amount of money guaranteed compared to what the grid offers you. Use that power at the right time to potentially make money from the grid through VPP events. And of course, in the age of grid unreliability and extreme catastrophic events happening nationwide from wildfires to winter storms to hurricanes, protect your home and provide power 20 fourseven.
Speaker 2:So those three goals is what our neatly designed hardware software product does. The Lunar System, solar storage load control. And right now we're focused on making more of those and giving a lot more people in The US that product to be able to achieve those benefits that you mentioned. And then the second part of our mission is, of course, hardware is important, and our goal is to deploy as much hardware as possible in people's homes. But the real magic is imagine a world where every home has a battery, every home has a distributed power plant.
Speaker 2:And if you combine all these homes together through intelligent software, you get what is called a distributed power plant or a virtual power plant, as they say it. And we make software that is used by utilities, it's used by anybody who has a lot of assets. It's enterprise software called Grid Share. That's where the magic happens where it connects to lunar systems as well as non lunar batteries and any other EVs and combines all that energy and power together and makes it 100 megawatts, 200 megawatts, you name it, depending on the number of devices, and then goes and trades with the utility and says, let's give you power when you need it. Now that's the same thing a centralized nuclear power plan does or a peaker plan does to get megawatts of power to the grid.
Speaker 2:But instead of putting these giant plans which take five years to build and so much extra cost, we believe that the better way is let people deploy these pieces of hardware in their homes, which benefit for lower cost of energy anyways, benefits them for 20 fourseven reliable power, and have them connect to the distributed grid and make it a virtual power plant. So I think that is the promise of what Lunar gives, and that's what we're excited about.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Thank you for walking me through that. So I wanna start on the hardware side. I hear you describing the system as solar storage load control. What I see when I hit your website and what I see being talked about and what is really beautiful looking is that battery.
Speaker 1:And I know there's other components now, and you've been building out this kind of ecosystem of products, so I'd like to understand that. But what I see with these contemporary or maybe we're in a moment where these are the next gen type climate tech companies is that design gets a ton of attention. There's a recognition clearly at LUNAR that if we were going to put hardware, so batteries, other components, either in your home, on the side of your house, it needs to look stunning. Right? So there's this exterior design aesthetic to the product.
Speaker 1:I kinda wanna talk about that first, and then we'll go inside the product. But let's talk about that philosophy where you said, you know what? This is gonna be really critical that we bring something that looks like a consumer product to the consumer to do this function.
Speaker 2:100%. It's very easy or boring to stack a bunch of batteries and put a ugly cover on it, and anybody can do that. Right? But Steve Jobs led the way and showed us that, yeah, you can make a PC which looks boring, but design and how things look matters. So Lunar's founding philosophy has been about brilliantly designed products.
Speaker 2:And there's a misnomer that brilliantly designed products are therefore expensive. That is what LUNAR is trying to squash. You want these products to add to the value of the home as opposed to just be like a gas heater which is hidden behind cupboards and compartments. We want people to show off this product and be proud of it. Because ultimately this is a very proud moment where you're generating your own energy, you're storing it.
Speaker 2:Classic American independence values that we want people to be proud of. It gives me a lot of joy when people actually notice that because it's not just the exterior, it's everything around our product. It has no ugly disconnect boxes and that took a lot of design work to get there. The Sahara curve, which sort of denotes how power flows in a home in an AC sine wave, we've thought a lot about that. If you put this lunar system outside in a home, depending on how the sun moves, you actually see different shades of light going through the product in the home.
Speaker 2:All that was very intentional. The type of the lunar blue color that we use was decided after a lot of choices that gives the right amount of sunlight and shade. So the inspiration of that Sahara curve comes from the Sahara Desert when you see shadow on one side and brightness on the other side. The front lines of the lunar system echoes that. Can you imagine an energy product that I'm proud to show to my neighbors as opposed to sort of hiding it behind?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Absolutely. And it reminds me of we had Mary Powell on the show from Sunrun, and you guys have a very close relationship with the companies. And when she talks about homes turning into mini power plants. Right?
Speaker 1:And I know that's an ethos that that you share. And to me, if I had this on my house and friends come over and like, what is that, like, thing? You know? I'm like, oh, that? You mean my mini power plant on the side of my and it looks like that?
Speaker 1:Yeah. You mentioned Steve Jobs and the power of design and that human centric design. Plus, I think it's like, we'll start getting into the more technical aspects of the product to give it that accessibility. Right? That sense of like, oh, look at this thing.
Speaker 1:That's cool. It looks like a consumer I can see how powerful that is for growing your brand, growing awareness, and how you wanna sit in the market. Yeah. And I see on the site, you'd won the IFTTT Design Award, which is one of the world's largest and most prestigious design competition. So I'll pause.
Speaker 1:I geek out about design. I love design too. We got a lot to get to, but the way it's positioned on the site is beauty and beast. And beast, I think you alluded to in some of the like this can just the way you design for durability, the way you design for high performance. So can you talk us through some of those elements of of how this pro what this product does and and how you get there?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I love that you picked upon that phrase beauty and beast because we genuinely stand behind that statement. We've covered the beauty portion just now. The beast portion comes from the performance aspect that a product gives, and I can describe some of that. It's got a powerful DC coupled inverter that takes both solar and storage, solar and battery at the same time.
Speaker 2:It reduces the need for an extra inverter that is designed in most other common systems, So it reduces cost and adds powerful performance with a hybrid inverter. The battery modules stack elegantly in modular fashion in five kilowatt hour capacity. It's the most flexible battery system. And what what do I mean by that? You can have a home which needs 10 kilowatt hours of energy capacity all the way to 30 kilowatt hours of energy capacity in one battery tower, which neatly stacks vertically.
Speaker 2:Now the vertical stacking might seem trivial, but it's not, because space in people's homes is of premium. Just like aesthetics is important to us, optimizing for tight spaces and making it compact is a very important ethos, because, you know, I've worked a lot in homes and residences. Every home is a snowflake so that you have to use the least amount of space and stacking things vertically is the most elegant and useful way of taking space. Because when you try to stack these things horizontally, run into fire code and three foot window rolls and door rolls, so you run out of space. So that's an advantage.
Speaker 2:The other aspect of the beastness or the high performance is that it is flood proof. You can submerge this whole product in a meter of water. If you're in Florida and if you have a hurricane and your basement is full of water and you have this product in the basement, it'll keep running, not just be okay after the hurricane goes away, but it'll keep running under a meter of submission. So it's literally flood proof. And and that IP 68 rating, which makes sure that nothing goes inside, dust or water, is our promise to customers because twenty four seven power is such an important statement and an important benefit of our product.
Speaker 2:It can be wall mounted or floor mounted in the garage, outside the garage. You can stack it into multiple configurations. Lunar's sort of philosophy is that, and I use this word homes or snowflakes. What I mean by that is every home is different. From New England to Palm Springs, California, you have different types of homes, different types of places where you want to put the product, different environmental conditions.
Speaker 2:Some have a stone facade, some have a wall facade. So we needed to design a product that works across the swath of homes. And that's why we put so much thought into how it mounts, how it installs, how much power it generates, and that's where the beast element comes in. It works in every kind of home and every kind of situation. That's the promise we have here.
Speaker 1:There's an excellent video on your website, we'll link to it in the show notes, where your engineers and quality control folks are talking about all the testing that's going on in the facility. And it shows, I believe, these, like, racks of older batteries that are now kind of running from almost different vintages, right, that are still running in a controlled environment as you're testing. Okay. Here's the twenty twenty two battery, twenty twenty three battery. How is it doing over time?
Speaker 1:Because you have one these things are gonna be on a home for a long time. You have you guarantee them. I think it's maybe a twelve and a half year guarantee
Speaker 2:Twelve or and something on years.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Twelve and half year. Right. But it's fascinating to see have that lens into all everything that's going on, you know, from a quality control inspection standpoint to be able to deliver on what you just talked about and have your engineers talking about, yeah, one guy who worked on cameras that had to be submerged to a certain depth and stay waterproof, and we bring that to how we engineer this product. So I just I really find that all just wonderfully interesting to get that peek behind the curtain.
Speaker 1:Did you wanna respond to that, Konopo?
Speaker 2:I just wanted to comment that these things go on a long stay for a long time in people's homes, and it's power is something so essential to life that we want people to never lose power. So for that promise to be true, we have to test our products to insane levels of reliability. And and that's where the reason why we raised the capital we did because we needed the labs to really have the testing environments, put them through extreme cold and extreme heat and extreme humidity to really put them through the paces. Even though it sits on a wall, it goes through all these environmental different conditions over time. So it is our promise to the customers that, yes, we do the work so that you get twenty four seven power for the life of the product.
Speaker 2:And if you ever find yourself in Mountain View, Air Bay Area, I would love to host you here and show you our facilities as well.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Yeah. We certainly may take you up on that. And kind of the extension of that, before we get to a conversation around some really cool things you're doing with AI and virtual power plants, and also some key differentiators in your app, and how you then marry the hardware to the software to create competitive advantage, which I'm excited to get into all of that. Before we go there, this is designed in California, made in America.
Speaker 1:Can you talk about the American manufacturing? Like, how you build that, how it scales, some insight into what that looks like?
Speaker 2:You'll hear me talk about philosophy a lot because these are things we decided early on in the journey of the company. So Lunar's philosophy when it comes to manufacturing has been that you can absolutely make things in The U. S. Cost effectively if they're designed right and planned well with the right kind of supply chain focus. So even before the IRA or even before the big beautiful bill, Lunar was already making things in North America.
Speaker 2:We were the most North American product in the market period, before it became fashionable, before tariffs and everything came on board. So as you know, we design everything by ourselves. None of the components, none of the systems in our product are bought somewhere else. We've designed our inverters, our batteries, our maximizers, our grid devices, everything is LUNAR designed. And we use contract manufacturers who we work very closely with to build these things.
Speaker 2:And since beginning, we had one contract manufacturer in Atlanta, the second one in Mexico, so all in North America. And then as of this year, we've moved everything to United States. So we have a contract manufacturer in the Washington State area and the Atlanta one continues and then we're adding another contract manufacturer, TBD, by the end of this year, somewhere in the Southern Belt. So we've always been a North American focused company. This year onwards, we're a U.
Speaker 2:S.-focused company. And there's a nuance called in order to actually sell these products and still get the ITC product, need the extra 10% credit if you're domestically content made. Thankfully, we were always domestically content. We had a lot of domestic content. So we are one of the very few players who made the right bets, believe that making in America is possible and cost effective and are doubling down on that vision by investing in more contract manufacturers in The U.
Speaker 2:S. Like I said, you need a very flexible, nimble supply chain effort. You need a design which is automatable, simple, labor is expensive in North America, so your products need to be designed in a way that the labor content is appropriate so that you can make cost effective products. So I want your listeners to understand that we're not doing this just for subsidies or anything else. We definitely believe in North American manufacturing.
Speaker 2:And I'm in some ways excited to be contributing in a small way with our company providing jobs and getting manufacturing back in The US in a big way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I think as we'll talk about virtual power plants, I mean, this is also strategic infrastructure. And I think that's a link that's becoming more understood as virtual power plants become more understood by a customer, right, or how they understand what's in it for them and how they can contribute to the grid. So, yeah, I find that really fascinating. Makes sense, and certainly timing is good luck in in a certain way, but if you're already doing what you're doing, I mean, that's right place, right time.
Speaker 1:So we've talked about the hardware. When you move over to the software side, and we started with that customer value proposition, right? So it's like, save money, make money. Right? Now to get to make money, you guys are bringing a lot of technology, and I'd love for you to explain.
Speaker 1:As you said, every house has its own fingerprint, its own unique energy consumption, it sits in a different place. And so even two homes on the same street, on the same block, might actually have different profiles that your software is optimizing for. Let's start to talk about that, like what that means with the machine learning and how you bring AI to enhance that lunar value proposition. I'd love to understand that better.
Speaker 2:When it comes to software, Snowflake is an interesting word. Fingerprint's a good word. So every home, like you said, depending on the size of the home, depending on the number of family members in the house, depending on the appliances in the house, depending on if they have an EV or not. Every home has a unique energy consumption profile and two neighbors do not use the same amount of energy, same time or consumption of energy, so that is established. And then what we're also finding is as utilities get more and more advanced, the tariffs that they're charging consumers is also changing in a very rapid fashion and a dynamic fashion.
Speaker 2:What I mean by that is in California, a few years ago, there used to be time of use tariffs, meaning you had a peak time and an off peak time, and you had different prices for those times. Now, in California presently, if you install a solar battery system, the tariff that the utility gives you is not just time of use, it changes every hour both the import price and the export price. So there is no such simple summertime pricing and wintertime pricing that's very static. It literally changes every hour, both on the export side and the import side. So you add that complexity of tariffs, which are very complicated, add to that the fact that consumers change their behavior depending on the season and the time of the day.
Speaker 2:And then the third complexity is that the sun doesn't shine all time. You have cloud cover, you have weather patterns. So you have three senses of variability happening, but your goal is one goal, is that the consumer should get the lowest price of power. So with three sets of variability happening between generation, consumer behavior, and the tariff, the only way you can do this is through machine learning and software. And that's what LUNAR bet on right from the founding of the business.
Speaker 2:We acquired a company called Moixa based out of London. This was a very talented group of software engineers who had built a very strong machine learning AI based algorithm. The platform's called Gridshare. What it does is exactly as you alluded, it learns about a home's pattern. It needs about two weeks to be installed in a home, and it starts predicting how a home will perform based on its past consumption.
Speaker 2:In addition, it takes this unique tariff information that is available on how the tariffs change. It also takes into account the weather patterns. So combining all those three inputs, it decides on a real time, on a day by day basis. In fact, every thirty minutes, it changes its plans. At the start of the day, it creates 300 plans for a home on how it would operate the next day.
Speaker 2:And then it picks the plan that's best. And then every thirty minute, it actually either keeps that plan or modifies that plan based on the performance of that last thirty minutes. And you can give it different constraints. One of the constraints is save the most amount of money. You can give it different constraints over time.
Speaker 2:You can say, just produce the most amount of green energy. Over time, you could optimize it and say, work with the carbon credit market and make it the most carbon intense. If you give it the right inputs, can optimize against those constraints. But for starting, we have given it the constraint that learn about pattern behavior of a home and make it the cheapest price of energy. And as we've deployed the Lunar system in the last year, we actually demonstrated that we show customers how much money the system saves.
Speaker 2:And what we showed to consumers is that for an average California home that this product was deployed, the Lunar system, which is a solar battery system completely, on an average saved $350 more than a conventional solar battery system would on a yearly basis. So think about this, a solar battery system in any ways saves thousands of dollars by just being cheaper than the grid, but the Lunar AI extracts even more value to save about $350 to, in some cases, 800 in a full year of more energy than any other system out there. So that extra value is what the power of software is. And this is just about saving money. We've not even talked about making money through VPPs.
Speaker 2:VPPs is an extra layer. But just through smart software, the amount of extra value you can extract is what we promise to the customers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That sounds that's fascinating to me. And when you say tariffs, that's the the cost, the price to the customer for
Speaker 2:right rate. Sorry. Tariffs Utility rate. Loaded term. Tariffs are like the normal lexicon, tariffs mean different, but yeah, the utility rate, the electricity that you're given by the utility, the cents per kilowatt hour rate.
Speaker 1:Okay, and so export, is that's what's coming into a consumer's home, that utility rate
Speaker 2:that No, you that's import. So import is what you import in the home. Yes. So as an example, I'm in the Bay Area. In the Bay Area, the common import rate, what you get from the utility, is anywhere from 25 to 30¢, all the way to 60¢, depending on the time of the day.
Speaker 2:So it's that far spread. The export rate is extremely low, meaning that it doesn't, for the most time, the utility doesn't pay you anything for sending money to the grid anymore in California. However, there are times when the grid is extremely stressed in summer months that the export rate is quite generous. It's about 70¢, 80¢, could be a dollar. So you want the software to be aware of those export rates and make sure that the consumer benefits the most by Imagine a day where you have the system knows that the export rate is gonna be a dollar and your import rate is 50¢, so you have a 50¢ arbitrage value.
Speaker 2:In a regular battery system where you're just doing self consumption, you could be using solar in the day and end up finishing the battery before the export rate even starts. In a lunar system, it's highly aware of what the export rates are coming. So it'll charge up your battery in the daytime, And if you consume a lot of energy during that low price time, it actually will not use a battery. It will use the grid because the import price is low. It will wait in the evening and then dump the battery into the grid to export it at a dollar value.
Speaker 2:So that real time arbitrage, it can do because it's learning, it's thinking, it knows what's going to happen, and it makes decisions about when to charge the battery, when to discharge it, based on the constraint it's trying to solve. So that intelligence is what's going to drive, I think, the future of the grid. If you want to make distributed energy prevalent and be interactive with that grid, you have to be able to manipulate those electrons. I mean, the beauty about batteries is that it's the first time the technology it's a technology that can actually store electrons. And then combining software with batteries is again that power that now you can move the electrons the way you want it.
Speaker 2:And I think that's that's what Luna's trying to harness. The combination of batteries and software is what's gonna really make a major impact on the grid, on people's consumer bills, as well as how do you intelligently give all this power to the grid when they need it, and that's what software can do with batteries.
Speaker 1:Got it. The differentiation, let's say, between Lunar and other competitors in the market with batteries, you know, we've had Enphase on the show, but whether it's them or SolarEdge or Tesla, where you come from, what I've understood about the differentiation around AI and what you're describing is that you are the hardware and you are the software, and you are the integration of them into your system, and you are running the AI, you are running the machine learning, you are gathering like loads and loads and loads of data to continue to make your system smarter, and it's made it to your hardware. Is that how you would describe that advantage or the uniqueness?
Speaker 2:You said it right. The differentiation for the LUNAR system comes in many ways, but if I had to point one heart of the thing, is the hardware and the software working in tandem together is a big portion of that differentiation. Where putting batteries in a box is relatively easy, but putting batteries with power electronics and inverters and using software on those systems to extract the most value out of that hardware is our secret sauce. And it is the proof is in the puddings. Like, we have showed consumers who have this how much money this saves them more than any other conventional system that they would have had.
Speaker 2:And that is only possible because of the tight hardware software connection. The other part of differentiation is that we believe in an ecosystem of offerings, meaning this industry has been plagued by a lot of widget companies, meaning somebody makes an inverter, a third company makes a battery, fourth company makes a smart panel, a fifth company makes a charger. Consumers are fed up of five different apps, installers are fed up of five different systems that don't talk to each other and one firmware update messes up the other system. So LUNAR's differentiation comes from the fact that we did not we could have launched and launched sooner and just shipped a battery with an inverter or shipped with a solar system and add on systems later as most companies have been doing. We said no.
Speaker 2:We're gonna launch solar storage load control all in one because people need an ecosystem. So if you are a Lunar customer and you open a Lunar app, you can see solar charging the battery. You can see the AI software doing its thing. You can also control the loads in your home if you have an extended outage because we have smart breakers that pair with our system seamlessly to be able to control loads. And consumers have given us that feedback that this is the true smart home that I've been waiting for.
Speaker 2:Google and Apple claim that they have the home covered, if you look at those systems, all you can do is control Wi Fi lights. This is the first time that energy can be controlled. It can be stored and controlled in one app and one system. And you combine AI with that, that's what we're betting on.
Speaker 1:I get the elegance of that. To make that vision happen, and the way it strikes me that you realize it and maximize the full potential of your hardware, software, your technology is still through maybe it's the wrong word, but what comes to mind for me is it's like partnerships. I mean, you have this weird sort of dynamic, right, where to create the unified ecosystem that a consumer is like, I don't wanna deal with five apps. You got your thing, and there's this virtual power plant. Everyone says they're offering the same stuff.
Speaker 1:That just seems crazy if I'm the homeowner. Right? But to realize your vision, you have to have a partner mindset, right, to make it work for lots and lots of different players. And I know you've talked about some of the other kind of product extensions, way you're trying to do things to make it easier to hook up to, like, distributed energy, and that's a different kind of set of partnerships. So philosophically, I'm just really curious to hear how you think about that.
Speaker 2:Lunar wants to be that ecosystem company. And in terms of generation storage control, we have delivered to our promise. Next year, we're gonna add charging to that, and we're going to be fulfilling that entire promise of generation storage control charging. Having said that, you're right. There are other products that you can continue to make as a company or integrate and add seamlessly through partnerships.
Speaker 2:So to what extent is Lunar going to keep making a heat pump or different kinds of things? Yes, we will attempt to make things where we add value, but we're conscious of the fact that consumers will buy different things. So our vision is that the base power plant ecosystem should be provided by LUNAR. Once you have the generation, the storage, the control, the software, and charging is the core of the car, because every home will have an EV. After that, if people want to connect to their thermostat or their heat pumps, we allow that through our app for them to seamlessly add devices, you should be able to.
Speaker 2:But what we believe is that the central energy production and storage is in our app. So we believe that is the right place where you can connect other things. As opposed to a thermostat company saying, I'm the center of the home, so you should connect all devices to me. Or a Google or an Apple saying, Well, I am the big brand, so you should connect to me. We believe that the power plant is a central nervous system of the energy flow in a home.
Speaker 2:Other apps connecting to that is going to be the right place because you can see generation storage, and then you can add different appliances to through the app. So that's our vision is to partner with people, make our API available, at the same time do some custom integrations. I mean, for a fact, we are working with Tesla EVs. They're very popular. People use them.
Speaker 2:So you can actually add Tesla EVs to the Lunar app while we build our own charging, but you don't have to use Lunar's charger. So we will continue to add these integrations for most popular and desired devices by consumers. So that's one level of partnership. The other level of partnership, which we haven't talked about, is that we make all these wonderful products, but we don't install them in people's homes. These products have to make their way into people's homes, and that also requires partnerships.
Speaker 2:So we partner with installer partners or companies. Sunrun is a fantastic partner of ours, which deploys a lot of our products in people's homes, and we're expanding that partnership to other installer partners as well. So partnership to Lunar comes in device and technology partnerships for expanding the ecosystem in homes and its installer partnerships to give this product in homes. The third level of partnerships is utility and energy retailer partnerships, because remember, we want to not only deploy a lot of hardware, but be able to connect all these things together and deliver that energy to the utilities and energy retailers, that requires partnerships as well. So those three partnerships, device technology, installation, and utilities, is the kind of partnerships we have at Lunar.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about that utility side, and and maybe that's a way into the virtual power plant conversation, because I know we we talked about the savings through grid share, and the technology can just leverage the battery, like, so much better than batteries have been leveraged before. But in that kind of also for the for the customer, the make money, right, this virtual power plant component, but also for the greater conversation around the promise of virtual power plants, really seems to be arriving very quickly. How does Lunar approach that and work with utilities to make that happen?
Speaker 2:The software product that enables all of these devices to connect together is called Gridshare. This is a platform that anybody who has assets, By assets, I mean behind the meter batteries could be EVs, could be thermostats, any asset owner. Now who is an asset owner? The asset owner could be companies like Sunrun. They own a lot of assets because they lease out batteries and systems to homes.
Speaker 2:So they are one type of an asset owner. So the grid share software allows every asset owner to trade energy with the grid. So the types of customers we have are companies like Sunrun who are leasing and owning a lot of these assets. Then there are energy retailers in California. They're called community choice aggregators.
Speaker 2:Silicon Valley Clean Energy, Peninsula Clean Energy, AIVA. These are the three Bay Area based clean energy retailers who use Gridshare today. It's publicly known. They use Gridshare as a distributed energy resource management platform, Durham's platform, to be able to connect all the energy in their territory. The retailers are types of customers.
Speaker 2:In Texas, for example, energy retailers in Texas also are using our product to be able to connect batteries in homes and connect them and trade energy with the grid. Similarly, many utilities like Connected Solutions in the East Coast, PG and E here, they all have virtual power plant programs where they say, If you bring this much capacity for distributed power, we will pay you this much. So our software connects all these different batteries to those utilities programs as well. That is how we sort of interface. I tell people a simple way to think about it is whoever has lots of devices and whoever wants to pay us, we will adjust our business model and give them the platform.
Speaker 2:It's not just one type of customer. Utilities is a type of customer, but energy retailers is one, Sunrun like asset owners or other. And we predict that all of these entities will dramatically increase the use of platforms like ours because you'd need a software platform to be intelligently, you know, aggregate and optimize energy. Now what does that even mean? I I'll take thirty seconds to explain that.
Speaker 2:Imagine if you have 10,000 homes and all those 10,000 homes have either lunar batteries or other batteries, Tesla batteries, N phase batteries, other batteries. And each of those batteries has 20 kilowatt hours of capacity. And the grid gives you a command and says, I want 10,000 homes to deliver. 10,000 homes times 10 kilowatts is like 100 megawatts of power. Right?
Speaker 2:So you can suddenly get 100 megawatts of power, but each of those homes does not have the full 20 kilowatt hour available. Some could be in different cycles, some could be at two kilowatt hours, some could be at 10 kilowatt hours. Normal software systems, what they do is they play safe and they say, I'm just going to give everyone three kilowatt hours, and that's the available energy I can give. Whereas remember, our system is per home optimizer. Because we know every home's potential and we know what the home is going to do the next day, our software can give the most amount of power and energy for that home.
Speaker 2:So in some systems, you could get only 50 megawatts out of 10,000 homes because they play conservative, whereas our system tries to maximize the power and energy for that home because we have that per home knowledge. So that's, again, a differentiator on our Gridshare software compared to the others in the market.
Speaker 1:Interesting. I appreciate you walking me through that. Just purely on the business relationship of it. And this is the other thing I've wondered about when you have five apps and all these companies who are playing different roles, you've got a GoodLeap who's doing the financing of systems, and you have a Sunrun who's installing systems, and also financing Solar Plus Power, and then you've got folks who are, like you said, connected to the smart thermostat or the electric heat pump that sounds smart and everybody wants to do a virtual power plant. If I'm the utility, am I thinking like this is chaos.
Speaker 1:I don't know what that picture is like and where software needs to sit and who needs to own that relationship, But we love talking to these kinds of companies and we love having the virtual power plant conversation, but I haven't yet to figure out what is the orchestrating layer that actually gets the utility to say, okay, cool. I don't actually want to manage a zillion different programs. I just want this to I need this to work too. I'm a customer. Right?
Speaker 1:And I don't have Kunal and all your engineers sitting in my utility to do this on my end. I need it to work and just work the way I want it to. How does LUNAR sit in that, and what is that picture like?
Speaker 2:You nailed it. You understood the problem of the utilities really well. They see the explosion of these devices in people's homes. They see the potential. They're like, wow, we can actually now control all these things and not have to build more centralized power plants.
Speaker 2:But with that potential comes the problem of we don't have the capability to talk to all these devices. So that is why LUNA's grid share platform is a solution for exactly that problem, where we tell the utilities, hey, utility, you don't have to worry to go into every home and go and connect to all these homes and get the power, get the messages. You stay at an abstract layer. Tell us the megawatts you need and we will just bring those megawatts to you. It is our job to do the hard and dirty work of connecting to every device, making sure that the homeowner is informed about that device being used through our app and also making sure we extract maximum amount of energy and power from that device.
Speaker 2:We abstract that. And so a utility, all they have to do is press a button and say, I need 50 megawatts, I need 100 megawatts. Lunar, you do that work downstream. So that's what a derms platform does, is abstract that for the utility. And as we have shown with the three CCAs that we work in California, they chose us for exactly that reason because they needed a platform that interfaces with EVs, be it any brand of EVs, any brand of home batteries, any brand of thermostat, while they can solve their problems like solving resource adequacy needs or solving frequency regulation needs.
Speaker 2:So that world is what we provide our Derms platform for.
Speaker 1:We have a couple of minutes left, and as I'm reflecting back on this conversation, we've kind of explored the full sort of lunar ecosystem and the hardware side and the software side. I just wonder, like, do you sleep at night? I mean, are you so excited about where you are and and what's ahead? I know that there's there's some issues on the horizon and tax credit sunsets and things that the industry is going to have to deal with, but what's your state of mind as we're in 2026 and looking ahead right now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I do sleep at night and I recommend to everyone to sleep well because that actually makes I've had my days of insomnia, I would not lie. As a founder, CEO, everyone has had those. But currently, I'm in a state of excitement and in a state of high focus and we have an exciting year for us where we're going to 3X our volume of products in the market. And we have some exciting partnerships in the horizon for our software. 2026 is the year of execution and focus.
Speaker 2:As alluded earlier, we've just raised our Series D capital of $102,000,000 and more. We'll announce that shortly. That capital allows us to execute to our goals, and we are excited about that. So running a company is hard, but I wouldn't trade my job for anything else because the impact that we create with our products, both hardware and software, really makes difference. And I mean it, everyone at Lunar believes that.
Speaker 2:Every home that has a Lunar system is not using fossil fuel based energy. Every software that helps Grid get more energy from our distributed systems, does not use a fossil fuel based peaker plant. So the mission is so impactful that I actually sleep well at night knowing that my mission is great, and we have an exciting year ahead of us.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, Kanal, it has been just such a pleasure to get a chance to talk with you and hear the lunar story. It's incredibly inspiring. So congratulations, and we are excited to follow your progress certainly in the year ahead and and beyond.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Josh.
Speaker 1:And thank you for listening. If you're enjoying the super cool conversation that combines commerce, innovation, and climate, please take a moment to subscribe and leave us a review. It's the best way you can help other future forward decision makers hear these conversations too. See you next time.