Red River Insights - Energy top10
Beyond Electrons: The Operating System of Energy
Red River Insights - January 2026
Dear friends,
Energy is entering its constraints era. Not because we forgot how to generate clean electrons, but because demand is now rising faster than the system can absorb it, driven by electrification, reindustrialization, and - in some markets more than others- the fast-growing load from data centers and AI.
Here the transatlantic picture diverges sharply. In the US, electricity demand is accelerating: data centers alone consumed around 180 TWh in 2024. Grid connection queues are measured in gigawatts, and hyperscalers are spending $320 billion in 2025 to build capacity. Europe’s trajectory is different. After two consecutive years of decline, EU electricity consumption in 2024 recovered by just 1.4% and industrial demand remains flat. Data center construction is not happening at US scale, and near-term growth projections are modest. While the European Commission’s Grid Action Plan projects a strong rise in electricity consumption by 2030, that timeline assumes electrification and reindustrialization targets that many observers consider closer to 2050 than 2030.
The bottlenecks, however, are real on both sides of the Atlantic: grid connection delays stretching into years, congested networks limiting new capacity, price volatility undermining business cases, and the persistent need for power that stays on when the wind stops and the sun goes down.
That is why this month’s ranking focuses less on adding one more generation asset and more on the companies building the operating layer of energy: retail and procurement engines that turn power sourcing into a product), software that orchestrates flexible demand and distributed assets, storage operated as dependable infrastructure, grid monitoring and early-warning systems, and the return of dispatchable clean power as a serious investment category - from advanced fission to fusion.
We call this theme “Energy,” but it could just as well be an “Electricity Top 10.” Electricity features overwhelmingly across the list of energy startups. As always, this ranking is produced by RAMP’s Growth Score (momentum and leading indicators). It is not hand-picked by us.
RAMP's Energy top10
We hope this sparks interesting conversations. If you have any comments or would like to suggest a startup that should be included, feel free to reach out to us. Joseph, Chloé, Luc-Emmanuel and Olivier will be delighted to discuss these trends and rankings.
(Ranking established on 25/01/2026)
We’ve highlighted 5 key trends illustrated by these companies:
1. The electricity supplier is being rebuilt as a software and risk engine
Energy retail is being re-priced at the point closest to revenue: the contract. “Re-rating” here means the market is starting to value suppliers less like commodity retailers and more like software plus risk-management businesses, because that is where differentiation and margin now live.
Companies like Fuse Energy and trawa reflect the new playbook: structuring procurement, signing long-term PPAs (Power Purchase Agreements), and hedging intelligently to protect customers from volatility. In a system defined by price swings and intermittent supply, risk management becomes part of the product. The suppliers who master this complexity are the ones most likely to capture the margin legacy retailers used to take for granted.
2. Flexibility is becoming a first-class commodity, not a side effect
Volatility is no longer a temporary growing pain. It is the new baseline. In 2025, wind and solar produced more electricity than fossil fuels in the EU for the first time .
That creates a structural opportunity for orchestration players like suena, which turn controllability into recurring cashflows by shifting when assets consume or deliver electricity. The most valuable energy software is the software that acts: dispatching batteries, modulating industrial loads, and optimizing charging schedules in real time, instead of only reporting what happened after the fact.
3. Distributed electrification is moving from components to installed and operated systems
Batteries, solar panels, and heat pumps do not scale as categories when sold as generic boxes. The winners bundle hardware with intelligent controls, uptime guarantees, and a clear value story that stacks multiple revenue streams: self-consumption savings, grid services, capacity markets. That is why players like iwell and Cactos matter on the operations side. They treat distributed assets as a fleet to be optimized, not isolated units to be forgotten. And it is why Reonic matters on the deployment side: it provides the installer operating system that turns selling, designing, and installing these systems into a repeatable, scalable workflow.
4. Grid constraint is becoming the new cloud outage, and visibility technology is the fix
As grids become more stressed under rising demand and intermittent supply, the cost of failure rises financially, politically, and socially. This is why resilience-enabling technologies like Optics11 matter: when you cannot expand infrastructure fast enough, you need better monitoring and earlier warning to keep the system operating within safe limits. This trend lives below the user interface, in substations and cable trenches, but it is exactly where budgets flow when reliability becomes non-negotiable for utilities and regulators alike.
5. Fusion crosses the fundability threshold
Wind and solar are scaling faster than most forecasts predicted, but the system still requires dependable clean power for calm-dark periods (those stretches when neither wind nor sun delivers) and for heavy industrial processes that demand constant heat. In the near term, advanced fission startups like HEXANA are positioning Generation IV reactors as sources of industrial heat plus steady baseload power. Looking further ahead, fusion has crossed into a serious venture category in Europe. Proxima Fusion now stands at roughly €200 million in total funding, and the EU’s Fusion for Energy Observatory reports cumulative private fusion funding at approximately €13 billion as of September 2025.
The takeaway: After a decade where the energy story was predominantly about adding more renewables, the narrative is shifting to building a reliable clean system. That system will likely require a combination of expanded and modernized grids, utility-scale and distributed storage, demand flexibility, and eventually new sources of power. Fusion is not a 2026 solution, but it is increasingly being treated as a serious investment category for the 2030s.
Many Open Questions Remain, here are a few:
1. Who becomes the system operator for distributed energy? As batteries, EV charging infrastructure, heat pumps, and rooftop solar scale into the tens of millions of units, someone has to coordinate these small assets into a coherent grid resource. Will value accrue to the orchestration software layer, to utilities and retailers that own the customer relationship, or to hardware players that bundle control capabilities by default?
2. Is storage a product business, a financing business, or a trading business? Batteries present as infrastructure, but their economics depend on stacking multiple revenue streams over a project’s lifetime. Do winners differentiate through superior hardware and guaranteed uptime, through access to cheap capital and performance guarantees, or through sophisticated market participation that turns volatility into reliable cashflows?
3. What is the credible path to clean power in Europe, and when does it arrive? Europe is now funding both advanced fission and fusion development. Which route wins on timelines and deployability: smaller modular fission reactors delivering industrial heat and baseload in the 2030s, or fusion as a longer-dated bet with potentially transformative payoff? And what are the gating factors: regulatory approval, supply chain readiness, or public acceptance?
More on RAMP's scoring method
The ranking of these startups is based on the estimated momentum of the company, but the algorithm does not assess the quality or reliability of the products/solutions developed by these companies!
Find out about the algorithm behind this ranking and the way scores are calculated here: Cheat sheet on RAMP
In case you missed them, our latest top 10s are here: Nature & Biodiversity (December25), Digital Biology (november25), ( Women-founded startups (october25), Industry autonomy (September25) Advanced Materials (July25), Quantum (June25)
All the previous Top 10 are here.
Other portfolio news:
The Exploration Company is in talks to acquire Orbex, the U.K.-based small launch vehicle company that has reportedly been in financial distress. The companies signed a letter of intent to explore a potential acquisition.
Okeiro has joined France Deeptech, the community that brings together French deeptech actors, with sponsors including bpifrance, CNRS, Goodwin, Lazard, McKinsey, Rothschild & Co, and Thales.
Resilience Care published a new paper in ESMO Real World Data & Digital Oncology exploring how AI can support end-to-end real-world data collection and structuring in lung cancer, with a focus on building coherent disease timelines rather than simple static datasets. The research was conducted in partnership with CHU de Toulouse.
Robovision showcased its Industrial Vision AI platform at CES 2026 in Las Vegas.
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