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Samsung bets this island startup can tame the grid with software and batteries

The electrical grid has changed more in the last decade than in the preceding five. Solar, wind, and batteries have pushed power generation away from monolithic producers. But fundamentally, the grid still suffers from the same challenges.

“The problem on the grid is a peak problem. Most of the time you’re okay, you have plenty of power. But in those peak hours you might not have enough,” Michael Phelan, co-founder and CEO of GridBeyond, told TechCrunch.

Today, those shortages are most acutely felt by tech companies and data center developers, which need large amounts of electricity to train and operate AI models. 

“But if you have enough energy stored in a battery or you have an industrial load you can turn down — and it’s hundreds of megawatts — then you can start building those hyperscalers,” Phelan said.

GridBeyond has been building hardware and software to stitch together disparate parts of the grid to behave as larger virtual power plants. The startup already manages around 1 gigawatt of solar, batteries, wind, and hydropower, and on the demand side, it has “several gigawatts” across commercial and industrial facilities, Phelan said.

To expand its portfolio, GridBeyond recently raised a €12 million ($13.8 million) equity round led by Samsung Ventures, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. Other participating investors include ABB, Act Venture Capital, Alantra’s Energy Transition Fund, Constellation Technology Ventures, EDP, Energy Impact Partners, Enterprise Ireland, Klima, Mirova, and Japanese electronics and software company Yokogawa.

The startup has its hardware controllers installed in batteries and renewable power plants along with large commercial and industrial facilities in Australia, Ireland, Japan, Ireland, the U.K., and the United States.

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Like many virtual power plant companies, Dublin-headquartered GridBeyond got its start on an island. As Ireland began adding wind power, Phelan said, “they hit this problem where they were an island and they had to balance the grid. So it was very suitable for them to have things like flexible load that they could put into the market.”

Grid operators have long asked heavy users to curtail their power use during extreme heat waves. For example, paying users handsomely to shave peaks off demand. The practice is cheaper than building new transmission lines or power plants. The practice has expanded as renewables have surged, allowing industrial and commercial customers to reduce usage at night or when the wind dies down.

More recently, batteries have added a new dimension. GridBeyond manages several large energy storage installations, including a 200-megawatt battery in California. The new source of flexible supply helps fill dips from renewable power.

Batteries have another advantage: They’re far quicker at responding to demand than traditional peaking power plants, which can take minutes to come online. That allows the company to buy and sell power rapidly in a form of arbitrage. 

It also opens up new possibilities for data centers. Many data centers don’t draw power continuously, instead peaking during AI training. These events can cause oscillations on the grid — “you know the thing that collapsed the Spanish grid, which is not what people want,” Phelan said. Batteries located at data centers can absorb much of this load, smoothing out the facility’s profile on the grid so it doesn’t cause unwanted fluctuations. 

By plugging into a nearby virtual power plant or by using batteries installed on-site, “it’s easier obviously for them to get connection,” he said.

Update 5:30 pm ET: The article was updated to clarify the investment came from Constellation’s venture arm, Constellation Technology Ventures.

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Gecko Robotics lands the largest U.S. Navy robotics deal yet

The U.S. Navy has inked its largest robotics deal yet as the military branch looks to use robots to keep up with its fleet maintenance.

Gecko Robotics, a Pittsburgh-based company that makes robots and sensors for inspecting large industrial assets, has signed a five-year IDIQ (indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity) deal with the U.S. Navy and U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), the company announced on Tuesday. The deal starts with an initial $54 million award and has a $71 million ceiling.

The Navy will use Gecko’s robots and sensors to monitor the status and health of the U.S. Navy’s assets and fleets of ships, starting with 18 ships in the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

Gecko founder and CEO Jake Loosararian told TechCrunch that the company’s robots will crawl into every nook and cranny of the ships to create a detailed digital replica — sometimes called a “digital twin” — of each vessel. The company’s software will help the organization monitor the assets and recommend maintenance, trying to get ahead of problems before they arise and reduce maintenance times and cost.

“Once you create that digital representation using the robotic systems of the health and the condition of these assets, and even the digitization of the environment itself, then you can accelerate how quickly you can make decisions and repair,” Loosararian said. “You want to be able to build this living, breathing model that ensures that you’re reducing days into the future that these assets have to spend [out of service].”

This deal is meant to help the Navy reach its goal of having 80% ship readiness by 2027. Today, about 40% of the Navy’s fleet is unavailable at any given time due to the long maintenance cycles on these vessels.

“It’s like $13 billion to $20 billion a year in maintenance,” Loosararian said. “At a time when you need every asset you can get, that’s pretty critical. And these assets aren’t getting any younger either.”

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Gecko has been working with the U.S. Navy for four years. After a port engineer stationed in Japan reached out to learn more about the company, Gecko conducted an evaluation and a drew up a preventative maintenance plan. The Navy was impressed, and the relationship grew from there, leading up to Tuesday’s deal.

“We’re helping to ensure that our critical assets live as long as they can and never are down,” Loosararian said. “I want to live in a world where we don’t have ships going through maintenance cycles, because we just know what’s broken and what to fix while they’re actually deployed. That’s my vision of the future, whether it’s a military asset or it’s a power plant.”

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Amazon adds 1-hour and 3-hour delivery options in the US

Amazon is launching one-hour and three-hour delivery options across many cities in the U.S. as the e-commerce giant looks to compete with instant delivery companies like Instacart, DoorDash, and Uber Eats.

The e-commerce giant is making more than 90,000 items available via this new delivery system. If an item can be delivered to a user within one or three hours, they’ll see a label saying so next to that item on the Amazon app. There’s also a filter for these new delivery options in the app and on the site.

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Amazon Prime subscribers will be charged $9.99 for one-hour deliveries and $4.99 for three-hour deliveries. If you don’t have a Prime subscription, you’ll pay $19.99 for one-hour deliveries and $14.99 for three-hour deliveries.

Amazon said it is making the one-hour delivery option available in hundreds of cities in the U.S., including parts of major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., as well as Des Moines, Boise, and American Fork. The three-hour option is available in over 2,000 U.S. cities and towns.

The company is also launching a dedicated storefront to house items eligible for these new delivery options.

“Our customers are busier than ever and are looking for new ways to save time while keeping their households running. We saw an opportunity to use our unique operational expertise and delivery network to help make customers’ lives a little easier while unlocking even more value for Prime members,” Udit Madan, senior vice president of Worldwide Operations at Amazon, said in a statement.

The company said it is using its existing, same-day fulfillment sites for the new delivery options.

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This isn’t the first time Amazon has tried its hand at instant deliveries. The company previously launched one-hour deliveries under the “Prime Now” service in 2014, but it was discontinued in 2021. And then in December 2025, it piloted a 30-minute delivery option in Seattle and Philadelphia.

The company has been trying to get into the quick-commerce game worldwide. In India, the company in 2024 launched Amazon Now, a 10-minute delivery service for groceries and other items, and last year expanded it to several cities. Amazon launched the service in the United Arab Emirates last October, promising deliveries within 15 minutes.

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Gamma adds AI image generation tools in bid to take on Canva and Adobe

Gamma, a platform that lets you use AI to create presentations and websites, is launching a new image-generation product for making marketing assets as it seeks to better compete with the likes of Canva and Adobe.

The company says its new product, called Gamma Imagine, will let users employ text prompts to create brand-specific assets like interactive charts and visualizations, marketing collateral, social graphics, and infographics. Gamma currently provides more than 100 templates, which you can use alongside its AI tools to build the kind of assets that you need.

To power its data-driven asset generation features, the company is integrating with tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Make, Zapier, Atlassian, n8n, and Superhuman Go.

“As we started working with a lot of our early users, we realized that in the presentations they want to create, there was a variety of graphical design use cases that they all also had,” Grant Lee, Gamma’s CEO and co-founder, told TechCrunch. “So we worked alongside them to develop basically a new set of tools that allows them to go far beyond just the traditional presentation format,” he said.

Lee believes Gamma sits well between tools for professionals like Adobe or Figma, and legacy tools like Microsoft PowerPoint.

“We think we can serve the very long tail of knowledge workers and business professionals whose demand for their job is to communicate visually, but they just don’t have the tools. They need to pull in a design resource to be able to help with this stuff, and we want to make an-AI native approach that serves their needs in the sort of middle that we feel is really underserved,” he said.

Last November, Gamma raised $68 million in a Series B round led by a16z, at a $2.1 billion valuation. At that time, the company said it had ARR of $100 million, and 70 million users. The company told TechCrunch that it is approaching 100 million users now.

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