Santa Rosa startup CEO puts hope in venture capital to fight climate change

Editor’s Note: Throughout Sonoma County -- in boardrooms and on assembly-line floors, in garages and living rooms, in government offices and schools -- people are tackling global warming.

The Press Democrat is kicking off an occasional series about the innovators. We invite readers to propose stories of those involved locally in climate change. Email our editor, rick.green@pressdemocrat.com.

Venture capitalists may finally be interested in financing startups that are working on climate problems.

That’s the view of Keith Rose, CEO of Operant Networks in Santa Rosa, which hopes to attract VC financing.

“In the last year-and-a-half, tremendous money has been flowing into ClimateTech, because VCs are starting to see it’s not some existential problem in 50 years -- it’s today. It’s going mainstream, it’s probably going to accelerate, and now is the time for them to step in,” Rose said.

ClimateTech companies try to solve climate issues with technology. Operant Networks, a ClimateTech company, is developing a way for rooftop solar, electric vehicles, solar and wind farms, other energy producing equipment and the grid to all talk to each other reliably, safely and affordably.

Its customers will likely be utilities and power generation companies.

Since its founding in 2016, Operant Networks has received more than $7 million in government grants, Rose said. This year, it plans to begin the transition from pure research to commercial business and already has one Fortune 100 customer, he said.

That triggers the need for investors to fund growth.

“We’re actively pursuing our first institutional funding round in 2022. We’re seeing interest and having active communication with some investment firms who seem excited about what we’re doing,” Rose said.

He doesn’t yet have permission to identify the Fortune 100 company, and it’s too early to identify a venture capitalist, he added.

Rose gives Elon Musk and his electric vehicle company, Tesla, the most credit for attracting venture capitalists to climate startups.

“They’ve proven ClimateTech is not only real, but it’s here and now. Tesla really led the charge,” he said.

The roots of Optical Networks are in Agilent Technologies in northeast Santa Rosa (now Keysight Technologies), where in the early 2000s several Agilent engineers talked among themselves about the dangers they saw from global warming.

In 2005 some left Agilent to start Solmetric, which makes solar products in Sebastopol. Soon, others from Agilent joined, including Randy King who today is Operant’s chief technology officer. Rose came later from San Francisco.

In 2014, Solmetric was acquired by Vivint Solar, a residential solar provider, and King and others began to notice that residential solar providers had trouble communicating reliably with their solar installations.

In 2016, friends from the Solmetric or Agilent days formed Operant Solar, now Operant Networks, to tackle that problem.

King, a physicist, mathematician and engineer, is leading the company’s technology breakthroughs, Rose said. King’s personal goal is to help grow solar energy until it’s the major source of electrical power.

“Right now, we could build a grid that is one-third solar, one-third wind and one-third natural gas, if we only added intelligence to the grid. That's where Operant comes in. Eventually, we can get to 100% distributed renewables,” King said.

Operant has seven full-time employees working remotely in five states, Rose said. Mainly they’re software engineers, sitting at computers, developing software code and having lots of video meetings.

King and Rod Sugiyama, vice president of operations, are in Sonoma County. Rose is in New Jersey. The other four are in Washington, Texas and Iowa. Chairman Dave Bass is also in Sonoma County.

Operant has benefited from working with programs that help early-stage startups, including Clean Tech Open, Alchemist Accelerator and currently Creative Destruction Lab in Vancouver, Rose said.

“What we’re tackling is very big and complicated from a technology perspective. They’ve been very, very helpful to us,” Rose said. Operant has partnered with the University of California Los Angeles, the National Renewable Energy Lab, Sandia Labs and others.

Over time, Operant’s goal has changed, he said.

The team believes replacing fossil fuel with carbon-free energy to power the electric grid is an important answer to global warming. They say much of this energy will be decentralized away from today’s giant power plants.Think rooftop solar and electric vehicles, drawing from and feeding into the grid.

The industry calls these Distributed Energy Resources, or DERs. They are part of a movement called Electrify Everything.

In this scenario, some combination of solar and battery farms, wind power, biofuel and hydrogen plants, solar on rooftops and electric vehicle charging stations will join geothermal, hydropower, nuclear or others to supply clean energy to the 21st century grid.

How do they talk to each other and the grid, securely, reliably and economically?

“This is when the light bulb went off for all of us,” Rose said. “Now, you need to coordinate all these distributed assets as if they were a singular power plant. You will have a massive communications and cybersecurity problem on your hands that no one knew how to solve. At the end of the day, the electric grid has to work. We believe we have the technology to solve that problem.

“This is why the Department of Energy has given us so much funding,” he said. “They see a huge tidal wave of networked devices coming to the grid in the future. They acknowledge some pieces of the puzzle are not solved, and this is one.”

Geof Syphers, CEO of Sonoma Clean Power, where most of Sonoma and Mendocino counties buy their electricity, said that while he’s not familiar with Operant technology, he does agree that the future of the grid is significantly more distributed power resources, with less focus on giant central power plants, and the ability to control the devices will be critical.

In 2015 Sonoma Clean Power created GridSavvy to offer incentives for customers to coordinate the operation of their electric vehicle chargers, smart thermostats and heat pump water heaters with the needs of the grid.

“It’s a long research project into building a much more sophisticated grid,” Syphers said. “We’ve been learning ever since.”

Operant has financed its software research with multiple grants from the U.S. Air Force and the Dept. of Energy. The energy department gives thousands of grants to small businesses it believes may have solutions for challenges but that are too untried to attract private financing.

“The Dept. of Energy is doing a phenomenal job supporting the next generation of technologies through grants, in my opinion,” Rose said. “A start-up in the energy industry is very difficult. Sometimes it takes years. How do you fund early stages of technology?”

Mary Fricker is a retired Press Democrat business reporter. She lives near Graton. Reach her at mfricker@sonic.net.