The energy transition is producing real hardware breakthroughs: solar costs have collapsed, batteries are denser than ever, and EVs are going mainstream. The next frontier is making all of it work together. Spend a day inside almost any distribution utility, and you will see a very different problem than the one dominating the headlines. The people on the front lines of decarbonization are running the modern grid on emails, PDFs, spreadsheets, and disparate software platforms that were not designed to talk to each other. A homeowner installing rooftop solar kicks off a paperwork relay that bounces between an installer, a utility account manager, a hardware manufacturer, and a state regulator. Data from each new device arrives in a different format. Approvals stall for months.

After years working alongside utilities, co-ops, and equipment manufacturers, we have become convinced that a binding constraint on the next decade of grid modernization is not hardware; it is the absence of a shared operating system and coordination layer for the assets, teams, and partners the modern grid depends on. That is why VoLo Earth is proud to be co-leading Texture’s Series A.

The grid is the most complex machine on the planet, by far. It is aging and has struggled to stay modern and maintain efficiency over its decades-long tenure as an ever-growing organism. Depending on the region and generation mix, traditional centralized power systems lose a significant share of energy, largely through thermodynamic conversion losses at fossil fuel plants, a penalty that renewables paired with storage can dramatically reduce. But inefficiency is only part of the story. Utilities are also leaving money on the table without better coordination of assets and are incurring significant OpEx without the ability to better understand their own grid's assets and operations. These problems typically compound with smaller utilities but can be seen throughout the pecking order of co-ops, munis, IOUs, and even ISOs.

As a key example, distributed energy resources, or DERs, are the small power assets sitting on the customer side of the meter: rooftop solar, home batteries, EV chargers, smart thermostats, and increasingly any flexible load. Individually they are tiny. Collectively, they are on track to make up the largest source of new generation and storage in the country. The catch is that they only act like grid resources when utilities can coordinate them with the installers and manufacturers who deploy and operate them. Today, that coordination is essentially manual.

More than 3,000 U.S. utilities, 300-plus equipment manufacturers, and several thousand installers participate in any given DER program. The backlog of projects waiting to plug into the grid has ballooned past two thousand gigawatts. Regulators are pressuring utilities to launch new programs, including virtual power plants that pool home batteries into grid-scale resources, that were never imagined when their software stacks were procured. The longer this patchwork persists, the slower DERs come online, and the more utilities default to building new power plants rather than orchestrating what is already there.

Another key example is the understanding of existing assets on the distribution grid, such as switchgear, transformers, and load-balancing equipment. Most utilities are unable to visualize and model the operation of these assets in concert, which in turn means they lack good visibility into failures and maintenance requirements. Identifying a failure may currently require checking disparate, siloed software platforms and OEM firmware updates.

Texture's founders asked a question that most grid-software companies skip past: what if the real product is not another dispatch optimizer or another utility portal, but the connective tissue (or “single pane of glass” as we used to say at RMI) that lets every party in a DER transaction, or every existing asset on the grid, work from the same data and the same workflow? With the ability to easily customize and deliver new automated workflows that may be unique to a specific utility or use case? The result is a multi-tenant, AI-native platform that coordinates distributed energy operations across utilities, manufacturers, installers, and regulators in real time. Three design choices set it apart.

Reusable, multi-party workflows. Processes that used to be hand-built for each utility (interconnection, enrollment, device validation, telemetry, dispatch) become configurable software building blocks that redeploy across utilities with minor tailoring.

A shared device library. Texture has integrated more than 40 of the hardware manufacturers that matter most in this space. Each new integration becomes instantly usable by every customer on the platform.

AI-native automation in the loop. Document parsing, data validation, and anomaly detection that used to require armies of analysts now run through the platform, cutting manual review burden by an estimated half to two-thirds.

Together, these decisions turn what is today an artisanal, utility-by-utility integration problem into a true software product. A workflow built once can be reused across the entire network, gross margins resemble those of best-in-class infrastructure SaaS, and the cost of onboarding each new utility falls with every deployment. Most importantly, utilities can run complex programs and operations, including federally and state-mandated VPPs, with just a few clicks.

Bold claims require rigorous validation, so we got hands-on. Over the course of due diligence, we spent time inside live Texture deployments and spoke with utilities, manufacturers, asset operators, and integrators across the country. The pattern was unusually consistent: customers describe Texture as the first product they have seen that treats DER coordination as a single, end-to-end problem rather than another point solution bolted on. Texture is consistently winning utility-facing product bake-offs.

The strongest signal came from Vermont. Texture's deployment at Vermont Electric Cooperative pulled dozens of installers and multiple manufacturers onto the platform within months. Utilities like to talk to each other (literally and figuratively, via electrons) and soon others, including Green Mountain Power and Washington Electric Cooperative, felt the gravitational pull. The installer who used to file paperwork three different ways now files it once. The manufacturer that integrated into Vermont Electric is instantly useful next door. Each new participant raises the cost of using anything else. That is the network-effect dynamic we look for in a category-defining infrastructure company, and Texture is already showing it in the wild.

Coordination platforms are made or broken by the team behind them. Texture's founders combine two pedigrees that rarely sit at the same table.

Sanjiv Sanghavi, CEO, is a repeat founder best known for co-founding ClassPass and scaling it to millions of users before its acquisition by Mindbody. He later served as Chief Product Officer at Arcadia, helping to build one of the most widely adopted consumer-facing energy platforms in the country. He stood out in our diligence for an unusual ability to take the fragmented reality of utility operations and turn it into the kind of clean, intuitive product surface that creates real customer love.

Nick Brown, CPO, held key product positions at Knotel and Meta/Instagram and Victor Quinn, CTO, held key engineering positions at Better and Knotel. They have both built and scaled enterprise-grade platforms trusted by Fortune 500 enterprises. That is precisely the playbook Texture needs: secure data exchange across many organizations, enterprise-grade reliability, and a product that feels like the modern internet rather than the legacy grid. 

The three have worked together as a leadership unit since Texture's earliest days, which meaningfully reduces execution risk at this stage.

At VoLo Earth, we back capital-efficient solutions that accelerate decarbonization and generate compelling returns. Building utility-facing software is never easy, but we believe Texture's platform can win on product excellence, go-to-market approach, and timing, which has never seen more tailwinds and market demand than now.

The market for distributed energy coordination spans utilities, co-ops, community energy providers, equipment manufacturers, and DER service operators across North America and Europe. It’s a multi-billion-dollar wedge of a much larger global grid-software opportunity. No incumbent today provides a shared, reusable workflow engine that coordinates all parties in a single workstream. Texture is building that layer with the stickiness of infrastructure and the margins of software, and its moat compounds as more participants join the network.

The carbon impact is tangible. If we can increase grid efficiency by just a few points, we don't need to build as much generation and transmission, and we can leverage existing assets with high precision and capability. With the onset of AI and its insatiable demand, most distribution grids in this country are now seeing capacity constraints. While part of the solution is building new pathways to power, there is a sleeping giant in the room: dormant capacity sitting in the inefficient coffers of our existing grids (80–160 GW as the DOE indicates, or more than double that by some estimates). This capacity exists solely to serve massive demand peaks that occur only a few hundred hours per year, much of it in low-capacity-factor gas peaker plants (often at 5–15% annual utilization). If we can better orchestrate the assets and electrons we already have so they show up at the right place and time, we can unlock that sleeping giant. When Texture compresses an interconnection workflow from quarters to weeks, a clean energy resource comes online sooner and starts displacing fossil generation sooner. When a co-op stands up a virtual power plant in months instead of years, peak demand gets met with flexibility from existing assets instead of a new fossil peaker. Multiplied across the country over a decade, the avoided emissions are real and material.

We have long believed that the most powerful solutions to the energy transition will not come from building more of the old grid. They will come from making the grid we already have radically more coordinated. Texture is building the layer the rest of the distributed grid will run on, and that is the kind of company we exist to back.

VoLo Earth Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm backing capital-efficient solutions across the energy, mobility, building, and industrial sectors. Led by former RMI leaders and seasoned quantitative investors, the firm combines rigorous techno-economic analysis with hands-on portfolio engagement to accelerate decarbonization while generating superior returns. With more than 75 years of combined operating experience in the energy industry, VoLo Earth invests with clarity and conviction in the sector’s complexity — screening and winning high-quality deals, creating value from the first founder conversation, and driving portfolio companies toward successful exits. For more information, visit www.voloearth.com