Firma Power raises $1.4M seed to bundle wind, solar, batteries for data centers

Firma Power closed a roughly $1.4 million seed round in February 2026. The startup's software lets data center developers sign one contract for wind, solar, and battery capacity rather than stitching together dozens of separate clean energy deals.

The San Francisco and Princeton, New Jersey company built its platform, FirmaOS, on more than a decade of power-system modeling. Its three cofounders: CEO Brent Alderfer, a wind and solar developer; President Scott Burger, a former engineer at battery maker Form Energy; and CTO Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton associate professor and Burger's former MIT classmate.

Burger and Jenkins began talking in 2024 as the data center boom gathered speed. They saw the same problem from different angles: a clean energy supply glut that wasn't moving.

Why aren't data centers tapping clean energy by default?

The U.S. is on track to add a record 86 gigawatts of new wind, solar, and battery storage this year — roughly the size of the U.K.'s entire grid — yet data center developers keep lining up behind-the-meter gas plants.

Jenkins framed the founding question this way: "We started the company with the hypothesis that despite the fact that 98% of what's in the queue is wind, solar and storage, that's not getting tapped as the default path to power for large loads — so there's got to be some market frictions and barriers there. What are they, and can we build the platform that overcomes those?"

Past renewable deals bought credits that offset emissions, not 24/7 power. AI campuses changed the math. A "large" data center once drew 50 megawatts. A single AI site now needs 500 megawatts to 1 gigawatt — about what the city of San Francisco consumes. Matching that load takes multiple projects across a patchwork of owners and grids.

How does Firma bundle a patchwork into one contract?

FirmaOS takes a proposed site's size and timing — say 300 megawatts in 2028 scaling to 1 gigawatt by 2030. It runs the local utility's interconnection rules and ranks candidate generators on cost. Firma's team confirms each project can actually be built, signs a single contract with the data center operator, and sometimes buys and finishes projects itself.

"Because of our unique model, we can deliver executable load-enabling strategies in days," Burger says. The first data centers under contract come online between 2028 and 2029. "The usual alternatives, waiting for a utility's planning and procurement cycle or buying project by project, can take years — indeed, we often hear from customers that say 'our utility told us to wait until 2032 for a new gas power plant.'"

Firma is working on about a dozen projects with hyperscalers, AI cloud companies, and data center developers, though it declines to name customers. In several cases it has assembled portfolios on grids where gas-fired capacity would have arrived years later.

What does this unlock for the wind and solar queue?

Burger's team calculated that PJM, SPP, and MISO together could add roughly 200 gigawatts of clean energy by 2030 and still meet reliability rules — far more than the U.S. as a whole needs. Most projects in the queue never get built.

"Projects drop out for many reasons, such as grid upgrade costs, permits and local opposition," Burger says. "One of the most common is the simplest: no buyer. Without a long-term contract, a developer can't finance the project. In some cases, that's because a developer couldn't find a customer to sign a contract for the power."

Firma turns "bring-your-own-power" data centers into anchor buyers for stranded projects, adding new generation the grid would otherwise lose. Jenkins argues the economics already carry the pitch.

"We don't actually even need to market it as clean," Jenkins says. "It is clean, and it's important to many of these customers that it is. It's increasingly important to the communities that live next to these data centers. But it's also just economically competitive and basically the only way besides gas power plants to get to tens of gigawatts of deployable scale before 2030." Advanced geothermal will help later, he adds, but hasn't scaled.

What's next for Firma Power?

The startup plans to use the seed capital to expand its deal team and hit 2028-2029 delivery dates. With about 200 gigawatts of viable wind, solar, and storage stalled across three U.S. grids and AI campuses racing toward gigawatt-scale loads, the supply is there — the assembly isn't. Firma is betting its software becomes the faster route before gas plants lock in another decade of new emissions.

"This should be the easy button solution," Burger says. "We should see more folks looking to wind/solar/battery."