Energy startup Arbor Energy on Wednesday said it had sold up to 5 gigawatts’ worth of its modular turbines to GridMarket, a company that helps arrange power projects for data centers and industrial users. 

“Everyone wants more power. They wanted it yesterday,” Brad Hartwig, co-founder and CEO of Arbor, told TechCrunch. “The time frames are compressing and the scale is getting larger.”

Arbor’s Halcyon turbines are based on rocket turbomachinery, high-performance engine technology originally developed for spaceflight, and its first commercial turbines will be 3D printed and capable of generating 25 megawatts each. GridMarket’s order, if fully fulfilled, represents 200 units.

Neither company disclosed the exact price of the deal, though Hartwig said that Arbor has seen a “willingness to pay upwards of $100 per megawatt-hour.” A person familiar with the deal told TechCrunch that the total is in the single-digit billions of dollars.

The startup plans to connect its first turbine to the grid in 2028 and ramp production through 2030, at which point it hopes to deliver more than 100 turbines annually. The goal, Hartwig said, is to eventually produce enough for 10 gigawatts of new capacity every year.

Arbor’s initial designs intended for Halcyon to subsist on a vegetarian diet — the power plant would ingest organic material like crop waste and wood scraps from farms and timber operations, which would be turned into syngas — a combustible gas mixture — and burned in the presence of pure oxygen. The result would be pure CO₂, which could be captured and stored underground.

Under that process, each Halcyon turbine would generate carbon negative power. The organic matter it consumes would otherwise have decayed, releasing methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Since then, Arbor has modified Halcyon to accept natural gas in addition to biomass — making it, in effect, more of an omnivore. The process otherwise remains the same, meaning the CO₂ that emerges can still be sequestered. 

Because it’s using natural gas, it wouldn’t be carbon negative in that configuration. In fact, because methane leaks from pipes and valves throughout the supply chain, Halcyon turbines running on fossil fuel will still produce some greenhouse gas emissions while also fostering continued demand for natural gas. Hartwig said that the company is working with low-leak natural gas suppliers, and that it’s “economically a benefit to sequester that CO₂.”

“We see a long-term path to less than 10 grams of CO₂ per kilowatt-hour,” Hartwig said. That’s significantly lower than typical natural gas power plants without carbon capture, which release about 400 grams of CO₂ per kilowatt hour.

Arbor hasn’t abandoned its biomass-powered projects, and the sale to GridMarket isn’t restricted to one specific fuel. However, other announced deals built around biomass are considerably smaller than the one signed with GridMarket.

Like many energy startups, Arbor has gotten a meaningful boost from the data center boom. Makers of traditional gas turbines were caught flat-footed, and given the volatility of such markets in the past, they’ve been reluctant to significantly increase production. Hartwig said that they’d be hard-pressed to quickly ramp production, even if they wanted to. 

“Those supply chains largely all get bottlenecked by blades and vanes for traditional turbines. Those are fairly inelastic supply chains, both in how artisanal the production method is — doing directionally solidified, single-crystal turbine blades — as well as very specialized labor, the workforce behind it,” he said. “If you were to get in line for a turbine today, you’d be waiting until 2032.”

Arbor is betting that its machined and 3D-printed parts will help it get to market quicker. “People want power in the next few years and they want a lot of it,” Hartwig said.

Meta is launching Meta Small Business, a new company wide initiative focused on supporting entrepreneurship and driving AI adoption, Axios reported on Wednesday.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a memo to staff that small businesses have always been a big part of the company’s business model, and that tens of millions of entrepreneurs already use its platforms to grow and connect with customers. The company now plans to do more in the space.

“In the AI era, it should be easier than ever for people to build new businesses,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We want to build the services that enable this. This is important for ensuring that people broadly share in the prosperity created by superintelligence.”

Axios reports that Meta Small Business will be led by Meta President and Vice Chairman Dina Powell McCormick and Head of Product Naomi Gleit.

Zuckerberg has asked product managers, designers, engineers, and other employees to reach out if they’re interested in working on the new initiative.

Users might not like bots in meetings visibly taking notes, but a lot of them don’t mind if an app on someone’s computer is doing the transcription. That’s the core reason behind Granola’s popularity, which helped it secure $125 million in Series C funding led by Danny Rimer at Index Ventures, with participation from Mamoon Hamid at Kleiner Perkins. This has tipped the company’s valuation to $1.5 billion, it said, up from $250 million as of the last round.

The company said that existing investors like Lightspeed, Spark, and NFDG participated in the round as well. With this round, which comes less than a year after its $43 million round, the startup has raised $192 million.

From being a prosumer app that sits on your computer, transcribes meetings, and generates notes, Granola has been building features to suit an enterprise stack. For instance, last year, it started allowing teammates to collaborate on notes. It has now made inroads into enterprises such as Vanta, Gusto, Thumbtack, Asana, Cursor, Lovable, Decagon, and Mistral AI, it says.

With the fundraising announcement, Granola is also adding a feature called Spaces, which are essentially workspaces for a team. You can also create Folders within this workspace. Spaces have granular controls around who can access what part. Users can query notes from Spaces and folders separately.

The company understands that AI meeting notes are becoming a commodity at this point, with many players offering this feature. That is why, after introducing a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server in February, the company is introducing two new APIs for integrating the context of notes into AI workflows.

Granola now has a personal API that lets people access their notes and notes shared with them, and an enterprise API to let admins work with team context. The personal API is available to users on business and enterprise plans and the enterprise API is available only to enterprise users.

The API launch comes after a bunch of users, including an a16z partner, were mad at Granola for locking down its local database and breaking on-device AI agent workflows they had set up. Granola co-founder Chris Pedregal clarified that the company didn’t want to lock down data, but its local cache was not designed to handle AI workflows, and the startup decided to change how it stored the data. That move broke the agent workflows. Pedregal promised at that time that Granola would launch APIs for users to access data in bulk. He also said that the company will figure out a way to work with local AI agents.

The company said that it is also updating its MCP server to let users see notes in folders and notes shared with them. It noted that its app already connects with tools including Claude, ChatGPT, Lovable, Figma Make, Replit, Manus, v0, Bolt.new, Duckbill, and Dreamer, and the startup is working on bringing more partners on board.

As meeting note-taking becomes a commonplace feature, the value for startups in this category is to enable users and companies to take actions based on the notes and transcripts. This could range from drafting follow-up emails, or finding time for the next set of meetings, or drawing knowledge from the company database and CRMs to get closer to finalizing a lead. Some companies, such as Read AI, Fireflies, and Quill, have already started working in this direction.