Texas has the most open retail power market in the country. For more than two decades, anyone with enough patience and capital could get licensed, buy wholesale power, and sell electricity to Texans. Plenty of companies have.
In the first half of 2026, every single new electricity brand that entered that market launched on Light. Not a handful of them. All of them. In 2025, it was over 70%.
That is a remarkable accomplishment for a company founded in 2023, and it says something about what has changed in retail power. Electricity used to be a line item that nobody thought about. It isn’t anymore. U.S. power demand is hitting record highs, AI infrastructure is pulling hard on the grid, and residential electricity prices have climbed nearly 40% in five years. When power moves to the center of a household budget, it also moves to the center of the products that consume it. A rooftop solar system, an EV, an apartment lease, and a home battery are all, increasingly, electricity products that happen to be sold as something else.
The companies selling those products have figured out that owning the electricity relationship drives core product sales, deepens engagement, and opens a recurring revenue line they never had. What they have not been able to do is act on it. Becoming an electricity provider means state-by-state licensing, wholesale procurement, commodity risk management, billing, customer support, and grid integration. It takes years. The alternative—referring your customer to a standalone retailer with a one-size-fits-all plan—hands away the relationship you were trying to deepen.
MCJ is proud to back Light in its $46M Series A, led by Matrix and joined by Activate Capital alongside existing investors Spark Capital, Mischief, Gigascale Capital, and BoxGroup. The round brings Light’s total funding to roughly $60M and its capital base past $100M, including its credit facility. We first invested in Light’s Seed round in 2024 and are excited to continue supporting the team as it scales to serve an ever-growing market.
What is Light?
Light is a power company built as an API. A partner of Light’s designs an electricity plan around its own product and its own customers, launches it under its own brand, and can be live in as little as two weeks. Light is the regulated provider standing behind it, running licensing and compliance, wholesale procurement and hedging, rate design, billing, customer support, and virtual power plant operations (VPP). Whether you’re an EV brand, solar financing company, or property owner, Light can help you deepen your relationship with your customers—and generate ancillary revenue—by enabling you to offer bespoke energy plans that serve their specific needs.
That structure works across categories that otherwise have very little in common:
Battery and solar partners can combine behind-the-meter hardware, grid electricity, and VPP earnings into a single offer, removing the multiple-bills problem that has confused solar customers for years.
Real estate and proptech partners can embed a plan directly into resident onboarding, turning a burdensome move-in task into a revenue line.
Mobility partners can sell subscription charging that makes the cost of driving on electricity predictable, which sells more vehicles and more chargers.
Fintech partners can lower a customer’s power bill and hold their attention with it.
Light’s partner network now reaches more than 30% of all U.S. residential solar sales, over 500,000 homeowners, and more than a million multi-family units, with partners including Palmetto, GoodLeap, Emporia, Public Grid, Lunar Energy, and Moved. Run-rate revenue grew 10x over the past twelve months.
Why We Invested
Baker and Adam have built this before. Baker Shogry was one of the earliest hires at Plaid, where he was Head of Operations and then Head of Product, co-leading engineering, product, design, and support as Plaid became the infrastructure layer that let any company embed financial services. He watched an entire category of companies get built on rails that hadn’t existed before. Adam Compain founded and ran ClearMetal, the supply chain visibility software used by Fortune 500s including Amazon, through its 2021 acquisition, and now leads go-to-market at Light. MCJ General Partner, Thai Nguyen, got to know Baker in 2022, before Light existed, through the MCJ Community, as the latter was exploring opportunities within the climate space.
We think the enablement layer is where the value accrues. The instinct is to compare Light to other retail energy providers. We think the better comparison set is the platforms that appeared when an adjacent regulated industry restructured—Stripe in payments, Plaid in banking data, Twilio in communications. In each case, the underlying industry shifted, the companies that wanted to build on it were not technically or operationally equipped to do so themselves, and one or two platforms ended up owning the rails. Electricity is a much larger market than any of those, and it is the input that nearly everything else in the energy transition depends on. Light is not fighting incumbent retailers for the same customer. It is selling the infrastructure they never built.
The timing is unusually clean. The end of the residential solar tax credit pushed the industry decisively toward third-party-owned models, which is exactly the structure that requires long-duration customer relationships and embedded supply. AI-driven load growth has turned behind-the-meter flexibility from a nice-to-have into a strategic asset, and Light’s partner-mediated access to inverter, vehicle, and device data is a real advantage over retailers competing on price alone. We have been investing in retail energy since David Energy and Base Power because we believed this market would eventually reward something other than commodity resale. This is what that looks like.
It’s speed to power by another route. The grid can’t be built fast enough to meet projected demand, and the fastest capacity available isn’t waiting in an interconnection queue—it’s already installed behind millions of meters. The obstacle has never been the hardware. It’s that nobody had a commercial mechanism to contract for that flexibility at scale. Light’s partners have already sold the batteries, the vehicles, and the systems; aggregating them into dispatchable capacity through those existing relationships is a far shorter path than building it household by household. The same mechanism does resilience work, letting partners bundle home storage into plans that keep the lights on locally and support the grid regionally.
Where Does Light Go From Here?
Two things we’re watching.
The first is geography. As the country’s largest retail energy market, Texas has served as the proving ground. With PJM membership secured, Light is moving into New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and beyond, and its partners are already operating in all of them.
The second is category depth. Light has broadened its battery offering so partners can bundle home storage with electricity plans that provide backup power and support grid resilience, and launched its first EV-centric product for subscription charging. Each of those turns a piece of hardware someone already owns into a grid asset and a recurring relationship.
Underneath both is a straightforward idea: electricity is becoming programmable, and the layer that makes it programmable for everyone else is going to matter enormously. We’re incredibly honored and thrilled to be backing Baker, Adam, and the Light team as they build it.
Additional Resources