Critical Loop Raises $26M to Accelerate Flexible Power Expansion

Critical Loop, a Los Angeles-based industrial power solutions company, announced a $26 million Series A funding round on April 13, 2026, led by infrastructure investors Conifer Infrastructure Partners and Hanover. The raise, which includes participation from Better Ventures, Climate Capital, Adapt Nation Capital, and Cyrus Ventures, brings the company's total committed equity and debt funding to $49 million. The capital infusion will fund acceleration of the company's grid interconnection work and expand deployment of its flexible power platform.

The company addresses a structural constraint in U.S. electrical infrastructure: businesses and utilities typically face multi-year delays for permanent grid upgrades before connecting or expanding operations. Critical Loop's approach compresses this timeline dramatically by deploying temporary, relocatable microgrids that couple battery storage, distributed generation, and proprietary software-defined power control into an integrated system. The company's Cygnus software controller and CLB-5100 battery system—a scalable 1 MW integrated unit—can connect to on-site generation, existing grid infrastructure, and emerging distributed generation sources while being moved to grid-constrained areas as needed. This architecture allows utilities to serve new load while permanent infrastructure upgrades proceed in parallel.

The company has already secured marquee anchor customers, with San Diego International Airport as a key deployment partner. Critical Loop has also secured a supply agreement for US-made batteries through LG Energy Solution Vertech, establishing domestic supply chain partnerships critical to infrastructure resilience. CEO Bala Ramamurthy emphasized the company's rapid technical execution, noting that the team has "built a software and hardware stack that has the potential to accelerate time to power from years to days" in just two years, and expressed confidence in the team's ability to execute on previously "impossible" deployment scenarios.

While demand from AI data centers has heightened urgency around power availability, Ramamurthy noted that data centers represent only one subset of broader load growth across the distribution grid. This framing suggests Critical Loop's addressable market extends well beyond the current AI infrastructure boom, encompassing utilities managing distributed generation, renewable integration, and industrial load growth across multiple sectors. The $26 million Series A positions the company to scale deployment and further develop its hardware-software stack at a time when grid modernization has become a high-priority investment vector for infrastructure and climate-focused venture capital.