Former SpaceX engineer raises $26M for Critical Loop, which cuts multi-year grid wait times to months

Critical Loop is attacking one of the most stubborn bottlenecks in the energy buildout: the multi-year wait companies face when they try to connect industrial facilities to the grid. Balachandar Ramamurthy, a SpaceX veteran who spent 12 years there before founding the company, says the core problem is structural. The grid was designed for peak demand — the hottest day of the year, every machine running — so most of the time it sits underutilized, below 50% capacity by Ramamurthy's estimate. That slack exists, but the infrastructure to capture it doesn't.

Critical Loop's answer combines edge-sited battery storage, flexible generation, and an autonomous orchestration layer that decides in real time when to draw from the grid, when to store, and when to dispatch local power. The result, Ramamurthy says, is that connection timelines that currently run to multiple years can be compressed to months, or in some cases days.

“We decided to start this company with this vision of how can you get the power that you need quicker... By deploying energy storage at the edge and this orchestration layer that Critical Loop has created, you have this ability to identify when there's capacity on the grid, use power from the grid. When there's not capacity, store that in batteries... We closed the $26,000,000 round. Conifer Infrastructure Partners and Hanover led the round.”

Customer base and use cases

The commercial real estate channel is driving a significant share of referrals. A common pattern: a company signs a lease, plans to install energy-intensive equipment, then discovers a five-year grid interconnection queue. Critical Loop's system bridges that gap. Current customers span ports, airports, logistics hubs, and critical infrastructure. Ramamurthy also describes a hybrid configuration — pairing commonly available propane generators with batteries to handle peak loads — arguing this lets customers avoid both long generator lead times and expensive grid upgrades.

The battery and generation assets are mounted on semi-trucks, making them physically relocatable. As a facility's power needs evolve, or as utility infrastructure eventually catches up, the hardware can move to a new site, which Ramamurthy frames as the core of the company's capital efficiency model.

The raise

Critical Loop closed a $26M round led by Conifer Infrastructure Partners and Hanover, both described as seasoned energy infrastructure operators.

Longer arc

Ramamurthy frames edge orchestration as a platform, not a single product. The same operating system, he argues, scales from mid-market industrial facilities up to gigawatt-scale projects. He's also openly interested in integrating small modular reactors as that technology matures, positioning Critical Loop as the management layer for whatever generation mix ends up at the edge.

Before Critical Loop, Ramamurthy was chief engineer on the first crewed Falcon 9 flight — the Bob and Doug mission — earning a NASA Exceptional Public Service Medal for certifying the vehicle for human spaceflight. He describes the electricity grid as a comparably complex machine, and harder to fix than a rocket.