Daylight Energy just lit up the decentralized energy game with a $75M financing round, and it’s not just another cleantech headline, it’s a signal flare for where power, money, and code are about to collide. The New York startup is turning homes into micro power plants, wiring together solar, storage, and blockchain to push electricity into the modern era. $15M in equity and a $60M project development facility will fuel the buildout. Framework Ventures led the equity round, backed by a16z Crypto, Lerer Hippeau, M13, Room40 Ventures, EV3, Crucible Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and Not Boring Capital, while Turtle Hill Capital handled the facility. Translation: some of the sharpest money in crypto and energy just placed their bets on Daylight’s network.
Founded in 2022, Daylight Energy is the brainchild of four industry heavyweights who saw how the old grid couldn’t keep up with the world’s new electrical appetite. CEO Jason Badeaux came out of Piper Sandler and Bernhard Capital Partners with a finance mind wired for energy transformation. CTO Udit Patel earned his stripes as a certified grid operator at Con Edison and NYISO, a rare combo of tech depth and operational grit. Chief Strategy Officer Evan Caron brought two decades of market risk and venture capital experience from Riverstone and ClearTrace. And COO Dallas Griffin, an energy banker turned operator, rounds out a team built to turn kilowatts into code and yield.
Here’s where it gets interesting: Daylight isn’t selling panels, it’s selling participation. Homeowners pay a monthly subscription with no upfront cost, get backup power, and earn “Sun Points” for helping stabilize the grid. Those systems sync into a virtual power plant that dispatches energy during demand spikes, earning market-based revenue that flows back to the network. It’s energy democratized and gamified, power you can actually hold a stake in.
Their DeFi protocol, DayFi, takes it even further, linking crypto capital directly to physical assets. Investors can earn yield backed by real electrons flowing through the network. That’s the bridge between blockchain and the breaker box, and it’s how Daylight plans to make electricity a tradable onchain asset. The testnet’s already live on Base Sepolia, with the full DeFi launch set for Q4 2025.
The $60M facility will fund installations across IL and MA, roughly 1,200 homes in the first wave. The equity will scale ops, tech, and the DayFi ecosystem. For an industry where 60% of solar costs come from customer acquisition and CACs average $10K per roof, Daylight’s model flips the economics.
Electricity demand from AI and EVs is exploding while centralized grids choke on capacity. Daylight’s building the decentralized answer: a network that rewards people for powering the future.
