Who’s Who in Tech: Critical Loop is Powering Solutions

Bala Ramamurthy, Andrew Grinalds and Lydia Maher founded Critical Loop in 2023 with the goal of creating microgrids that will allow energy-intensive infrastructure to tap into megawatts of power in a matter of weeks. 

The Long Beach-based company’s mobile microgrids – which are localized electric grids that can either operate on their own or tap into the main grid – can be deployed in energy deserts like islands or remote military bases. Owning and operating these grids allow military operations to better wrangle cyber-attacks from geopolitical adversaries. 

But the need for an expanded grid goes beyond military operations. The U.S. is working toward bringing back industrial manufacturing capabilities, growing electric transportation through electric vehicles and expanded train lines, and accommodating energy-intensive data centers.

The country’s electric grid, as it stands, is bracing to accommodate an unprecedented amount of power, and high energy industries like wind and solar companies are waiting years to tap into the grid. 

In an interview with the Business Journal, Ramamurthy, Grinalds and Maher talked about getting back to basics and improving a long-standing piece of infrastructure that has slowly become neglected.

What was the genesis of your company? How did it come to be?
CEO Bala Ramamurthy was an executive in residence at Oxford, where he met his co-founders, Andrew Grinalds and Lydia Maher. While brainstorming about big problems that can be solved with current technology, they realized that the industries of the future, such as clean transport and advanced manufacturing, depend on how well the electric grid functions. They also noticed that battery prices were falling fast while the grid was barely changing. That gap struck them as solvable right now, without waiting for some future technology to arrive. Critical Loop was born in 2023 to close it.

Alternative energy received record-breaking venture funding in 2025. Why do you think that is?
Electricity demand is growing faster than most people expected, driven by re-shoring of industrial manufacturing, transportation electrification and the compute buildout behind AI.

At the same time, investors see energy infrastructure as an economic competitiveness issue, separate from the climate argument. Energy access is a constraint on growth across nearly every industry; the investment case has become much harder to ignore.

Your company started a little before the AI data center craze that started in 2024. What was your goal back then? Has it changed much from now?
The goal hasn’t changed. From the beginning, we were focused on getting power to customers faster than grid upgrades could and doing it with assets that could adapt to their needs as those needs evolved.

Data centers considerably increased the urgency around grid upgrades. When the AI buildout took off, power access went from a slow-moving infrastructure challenge to something developers needed to solve immediately.

A lot of people associate the energy hype with AI and data centers. Beyond that, what are some overlooked use cases for a company like yours?
The grid wasn’t designed for what we’re asking it to do today. New manufacturing facilities, logistics hubs, space launch sites and airports all need more power than the grid can deliver on any reasonable timeline.

We’ve worked across most of those categories, and the power access problem is the same across industries. Data centers get most of the attention right now, but it’s far from the only sector facing it.

What are some bottlenecks facing energy startups like yours?
The regulatory and permitting environment hasn’t kept pace with demand. Standards for grid-interactive battery systems are still being written in most states, and local authorities don’t always have frameworks for approving installations quickly.

California has moved faster in some respects, but even here, there’s still work to do. The supply chain is another constraint; certain components have long lead times, and you can’t source batteries at scale without committing well in advance of demand.