Critical Loop, an energy company based in Long Beach, nabbed $26 million in series A funding to solve scarcity on the electric grid and get infrastructure projects back on track.

The funding round was led by Conifer Infrastructure Partners and Hanover, with additional investment coming from Better Ventures, Climate Capital, Santa Monica-based Cyrus Ventures and Adapt Nation Capital.

The U.S. electric grid faces a massive bottleneck, with housing and manufacturing projects delayed an average of five years due to soaring demand for power from generative artificial intelligence. Critical Loop accelerates these connections to mere weeks using mobile microgrids. The company currently partners with organizations like the San Diego International Airport. 

“If you want a robust and reliable operation, you want to be able to, when the grid fails, fail over to these backup systems,” Bala Ramamurthy, co-founder and chief executive of Critical Loop said. “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.”

Energy and AI

Investors have been pouring money into companies like Critical Loop, thanks to the AI’s demand for power. The energy sector in the Los Angeles area received around $11 billion in funding in 2025, amounting to more than it raised in the last ten years combined, according to PitchBook. 

But generative AI is still a rather nascent industry, and economic leaders are still bracing for the AI bubble to burst. If that happens, private companies’ valuations will be impacted, and future funding may flow less generously than what’s currently happening.

That’s not a problem for Ramamurthy.

Ramamurthy, who spent his career at hard tech companies like SpaceX that deeply focused on manufacturing, said Critical Loop’s main target has always been the industrial and manufacturing sector. Ramamurthy said there are many factors about AI that are still up in the air. It could be optimized somehow to consume less power, making it a futile target for energy startups.

“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.”