We started Eli after 7 years running large-scale energy programs because we kept running into the same wall.
Heat pumps, batteries, and electrification hardware have gotten dramatically cheaper over the last decade. The bottleneck is no longer the technology. It is everything around it: permitting, energy programs, contractor cash flow, financing, verification, settlement.
$80B a year now flows through that layer to upgrade American buildings, and $7.4B of it goes to PE-owned services firms whose entire business is administering complexity. They are structurally unable to innovate or offer financial products. Meanwhile the 200,000 contractors who do the actual work wait 60 to 120 days to get paid, and the capital partners who could fund the work at scale cannot underwrite it because there is no standardized origination or verification layer.
A quick note on the political weather: the $80B we are talking about is not federal tax credits or climate policy. It is utility ratepayer-funded programs, state-mandated efficiency portfolios, and private capital. These programs exist because utilities need them. U.S. electricity demand is growing faster than it has in 20 years, driven by data centers, AI, manufacturing, and electrification. Utilities use these programs to manage peak load, defer generation and transmission investment, and meet reliability obligations. They have operated for 40 years across red and blue states alike, and 2024-2027 approved budgets are the largest on record, with California utilities committing ~$5B alone. The work Eli does gets more essential, not less, in this environment.
The definition of "energy programs" is also expanding. Utilities still run the largest share, but the same structure — enroll customers, install equipment, verify work, move money — is increasingly used to stand up virtual power plants and other distributed capacity programs. These can be sponsored by OEMs aggregating their installed base, private capital building new revenue streams from DERs, or hyperscalers willing to pay for peak load reduction to accelerate power delivery to AI data centers. Innovation has focused on software for orchestrating devices and data, but these programs face the same deployment gap, with no way to automate program administration, enrollment, and settlement at scale. Same product. Same bottleneck. A widening set of sponsors.
I led some of the largest energy programs in the world for 7 years at GRID Alternatives, and before that led growth at Amicus (YC S12) and Farmigo (acquired by GrubMarket). My co-founders come from fintechs like LendingHome and built underwriting and risk platforms at scale. We started Eli because we could see the shape of what this market needs, and no one was building it.
Eli is the AI-powered operating layer that wipes away decades of built-up friction and unlocks capital at speed and scale. Contractors get paid in hours not months. Programs get instant, compliance-grade processing and settlement for a fraction of the cost. Capital partners get verified, standardized origination data they can actually finance. We started with energy programs because that is where the labor-heavy status quo is most obviously broken. We've proven that our AI-native platform can replace PE-backed legacy services businesses, and become the infrastructure for delivering capital to projects. The destination is the financial operating layer for the entire category. The digital bank for electrifying 130M U.S. buildings.
We are live in 3 states and facilitated upgrades to more than 8,000 buildings over the last year. $3.4M revenue run rate, growing 4x year over year. 0.07% dollar-weighted loss rate on more than $34M advanced to contractors. All with zero sales and marketing spend. We did this while turning away expansion in five states because we had maxed our existing debt facility. We are in the final stages of closing a $100M credit facility from a top-tier lender that unlocks the next phase.
The American energy upgrade is the largest building infrastructure investment of our lifetimes. It is well underway, funded by utilities, state governments, and private capital. The question is whether it takes 50 years or 15, and whether we put trillions of dollars flowing through it right to work, or waste a third of it on shiny suits, convention booths, and PowerPoints.
Happy to walk through the opportunity in detail.
