Apoorv Bhargava, WeaveGrid CEO on EVs, Energy and the Future Grid

Grace Gong (0:00)

Oh my god, we are live. Hi, Apoorv, welcome to Venture with Grace.

Apoorv Bhargava (0:05)

Thanks, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Grace Gong (0:08)

I'm so excited to stream at this coffee shop in the middle of the bar station, but...

Apoorv Bhargava (0:16)

We have great coffee in San Francisco, in the Bay Area, so there you go.

Grace Gong (0:18)

Literally. He said, I'm not in San Francisco right now, I'm in the middle of nowhere, but...

Oh, no. Shout out to the coffee person, he's very helpful.

Before we start our show, I want to give a quick shout out to my amazing sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Nebius, the ultimate cloud for AI novayers. Nebius provides AI infrastructure you can calm down. How many reliability and speed with flexibility and engineering support are matched by hyperscalers. AI leaders like Meta, Shopify and Higgsfield already partnered with Nebius to run their AI workflows. Plus, Venture back startup can save up to 150k on compute cost when they apply for access. Visit nebius.com or nebius.com/startup to learn more. I also want to give a shout out to Nicole from Wolven Venture for the intro. I want to start with your background. Obviously, I feel like nowadays, energy and just the grid is a very important sector. But right before this, I feel like even maybe two, three years ago, people were not really paying attention, but you've been in the energy space for so long. Maybe we can talk about what were some core lessons that you've learned early on in the eight years of creating your company, to what's the current situation now.

Apoorv Bhargava (1:31)

Yeah. It's been so fun. When I graduated from Stanford in 2017, at that point, people used to laugh at me when I was like, I want to keep working in energy. They were like, no, go do something cool at Google or somewhere else. I was like, I think energy is going to be really critical. Look, I see energy as a foundational platform for all economic growth. Whether you're building factories, whether you're building compute now, energy is ultimately the fuel that makes that all possible. Electricity is such a complex topic. I think too often people obsess over how we generate that electricity.

There's a very important conversation to be had about nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, coal, gas, whatever, and that is important. We continue to, of course, do a really great work on decarbonizing that. But in an era of dramatic need for energy abundance, I think we're struggling to understand that actually, the majority of cost in the power bill that we pay every month to our utility, the majority of cost is increasingly going to the delivery of energy. So the poles and wires are the actual delivery system, the network.

For an industry that's so obsessed with network effects, ironically, the first network effects came in electricity because you had to build a monopoly called the utility to deliver extremely low cost electrons to folks. But in the last, call it decade, in the energy sector, we've really seen what happens when you didn't have load growth, you didn't have demand growth for the end product, which was electrons, and then now we're seeing a dramatic shift taking hold, where suddenly between the first wave of growth was electrification, and now it's electrification and data centers on top. It's just leading to a whole series of questions around, how are we going to deliver so much more transaction volume through the same network, while of course keeping it reliable and affordable? I think that's one of the most interesting opportunities we've got, which is how do we make sure we have cheap, affordable, clean electricity that powers all of this compute that we're trying to get, whether from Nebius or anywhere else?

Grace Gong (3:53)

I have so many questions. One is, maybe for the audience who the first time hear about WeaveGrid, maybe if you could explain the business model as well as the space in general. And since you guys have worked with so many iconic companies, from Toyota, to Tesla, to all these amazing car companies, to nowadays with the data centers, maybe we could talk about the general concept of the buying process of these huge companies in this space.

Apoorv Bhargava (4:23)

That's right. Yeah, so our primary, think of us as just like orchestration in any field, we are an orchestration platform. So what we do is we orchestrate the way that energy flows through the network in the same way that when you're thinking about orchestration of computer, orchestration of workloads, it's the exact same kind of technology but being applied to the electric grid. Our orchestration platform, we sell to utilities. So utilities like Fijinean in the Bay Area or Southern California, Edison in SoCal or Exelon out on the East Coast, those are our customers. They are the people we predominantly work with.