Critical Loop Raises $26M for Mobile Microgrid Startup

Critical Loop, a Long Beach energy startup, closed a $26 million Series A round to deploy mobile microgrids that slash grid connection wait times from years to weeks.

The funding round was led by Conifer Infrastructure Partners and Hanover, with additional investment from Better Ventures, Climate Capital, Santa Monica-based Cyrus Ventures, and Adapt Nation Capital. For a company working on unglamorous but essential infrastructure, it’s a significant vote of confidence from investors who have spent the past year flooding the energy sector with capital.

The U.S. electric grid is badly backed up. Housing developments, manufacturing plants, and commercial facilities are waiting an average of five years just to get connected, largely because generative AI data centers are consuming power at a pace the existing infrastructure can’t handle. Critical Loop’s mobile microgrid systems cut that queue, getting projects online in weeks rather than half a decade.

That kind of speed matters on the Burbank side of the entertainment industry as much as anywhere. Production facilities, post houses, and the server farms that now underpin streaming pipelines all depend on reliable, on-demand power. Any technology that moves infrastructure timelines is worth watching for anyone running a studio lot or a media tech operation along the Olive corridor.

Critical Loop currently works with organizations including the San Diego International Airport, and co-founder and chief executive Bala Ramamurthy sees the backup function of the company’s systems as equally important as the capacity-expansion role. “If you want a robust and reliable operation, you want to be able to, when the grid fails, fail over to these backup systems,” Ramamurthy told the LA Business Journal. “The beauty of these systems is that they can be used both to increase the amount of power, but they can also be used to completely backup the entire site.”

The timing isn’t accidental.

The Los Angeles area energy sector pulled in around $11 billion in 2025, more than the previous ten years combined, according to PitchBook. That surge tracks directly with AI’s power appetite, and Critical Loop is one of dozens of companies riding that wave.

But Ramamurthy doesn’t want to be seen as an AI play. He spent his career at hard tech and manufacturing companies, including SpaceX, and Critical Loop’s core pitch has always targeted the industrial and manufacturing sector. AI accelerated the conversations. It didn’t change the underlying thesis.

That’s a meaningful distinction.

Ramamurthy is straightforward about the uncertainty baked into the AI market. Generative AI is still a young industry, and if the bubble deflates, private company valuations will take hits and the current flow of investor capital could slow sharply. He’s also candid that AI’s power consumption could drop if the technology gets optimized, which would make it a less reliable target for energy infrastructure startups. His company doesn’t need that bet to pay off.

“What we did became a lot more important and a lot more present in the conversations that are happening with large loads like AI,” Ramamurthy said. “I think that sometimes those conversations may not fully capture the range of this market. There’s in fact a vast middle where there are factories and logistic centers. Facilities consume several megawatts of power but are less cool than data centers to talk about.”

That “vast middle” is exactly what makes Critical Loop’s model durable if the AI funding environment turns. Factories don’t vanish when a tech sector corrects. Logistics centers can’t operate without power. The U.S. Department of Energy has flagged grid modernization as a national priority, and the backlog of delayed connections isn’t going away regardless of what happens in Silicon Valley or Menlo Park.

For Long Beach, the Series A is also a local economic story. The city has been building out its identity as a tech and clean energy hub, partly through proximity to the Port of Los Angeles complex and partly through deliberate recruitment of companies working on physical infrastructure rather than pure software. Critical Loop fits squarely into that profile. It builds hardware, it moves electrons, and it works with airports and industrial clients who need power to keep operations running regardless of what the broader market is doing.

Whether the company can scale fast enough to dent a five-year national backlog depends on execution and capital deployment. Ramamurthy has $26 million to find out, and a customer list that already includes one of Southern California’s busiest airports.