Fundraising, board selection, and investor lessons

As an aging grid faces rising demand, increasing complexity, and more frequent stress events, one thing has become clear: we don’t just need more power, we need power that can show up at the right time, in the right place, and at the right price. What’s far less settled is how we get there. Should large energy users build their own power? Should they treat the grid as something to work around rather than work with? Or is there a way for new load to actively strengthen the grid by contributing capacity when it’s needed most?

This moment is being shaped by real market signals. Just two weeks ago, PJM, the largest power market in the U.S., cleared its latest capacity auction at the market cap yet again, underscoring how tight supply has become and how quickly affordability pressures are building. As data center demand accelerates, those pressures are no longer abstract, they’re showing up in prices, planning decisions, and who ultimately pays.

These questions have been a throughline for us this year on Watt It Takes. We’ve talked with founders working across the grid, from storage and interconnection to transmission and large-scale development. Today’s conversation brings many of those threads together.
Dana Guernsey and her team at Voltus are tackling that challenge at the intersection of demand and supply, turning customer-side flexibility into dependable grid capacity. Voltus sits between energy users and grid operators, aggregating flexible demand from sources like demand response, EV charging, batteries, and onsite generation, and translating it into dispatchable capacity that markets value and pay for. Voltus’s business model is a value-share: the company monetizes that flexibility in energy markets and shares the resulting value with the customers providing it.

Voltus operates across all major North American power markets, even in an industry where each ISO and RTO plays by different rules. Today, the company manages more than eight gigawatts of flexible capacity and supports tens of thousands of customer sites, with resources dispatched thousands of times each year.

On this last episode of the year, I spoke with Dana Guernsey, Co-Founder and CEO of Voltus. We talked about her journey, from growing up in Queens, New York and coming of age around 9/11, to discovering energy markets during her time at EnerNOC, to founding Voltus while starting a family. That path shaped how Dana thinks about complexity, customers, and reliability, and ultimately led her to build Voltus into a platform designed to help make clean, affordable, and reliable power something we don’t have to trade off against growth.

About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures
Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage startups developing innovative software to advance clean energy, mobility, and industry. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team.

Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry.

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