Lunar Gridshare VPP and DER Platform

Lunar Energy was founded in August 2020 by Kunal Girotra and was started by engineers from Tesla; ITOCHU describes it as a US residential energy storage developer. Besides its own home battery system, Lunar sells the Gridshare platform, AI software that utilities, energy retailers and installers use to optimise and aggregate distributed home energy devices into virtual power plants.

Gridshare builds a daily plan for each site from consumption, production history and real-time prices, then aggregates and dispatches devices through VPP programmes while co-optimising customer savings and grid value. It supports home batteries, EVs and chargers, thermostats and water heaters from various manufacturers, offers fleet monitoring with early issue detection, tools to design offers bundling hardware and rate plans, and a white-label customer app. Sunrun, California community choice aggregators and ITOCHU in Japan use the platform.

• Site-level AI planning: daily plans from consumption, production history and live prices.
• VPP aggregation and dispatch: enrols and dispatches devices into grid programmes.
• Value co-optimisation: balances customer savings with wholesale and VPP value.
• Fleet monitoring: unified device view with performance tracking and early issue detection.
• Offer design: bundles hardware, rate plans and optimisation into new products.
• White-label app: customer onboarding, enrolment and programme communication.

Rooftop solar installers in Vietnam could bundle home or shop batteries with optimisation to raise self-consumption under tiered tariffs. Power corporations could pilot a residential battery VPP to shave evening peaks in large cities. Battery distributors could offer a white-label app to manage installed fleets.

Utilities and retailers can turn customer batteries and smart devices into dispatchable capacity without building their own optimisation software. Co-optimisation tracks both customer bill savings and wholesale cost avoidance across the fleet. In Japan, more than 35,000 ITOCHU Smart Star home batteries, about 330 MWh, run Gridshare software, showing proven scale. The white-label app shortens customer enrolment.

Home batteries and EVs are spreading quickly, and utilities increasingly treat them as distributed capacity through VPP programmes rather than building new peaking plants. In Southeast Asia, rising rooftop solar adoption and pilot VPP frameworks such as Singapore's regulatory sandbox signal growing demand for aggregation software, and Vietnam's push for self-consumption solar with storage points in the same direction.

Lunar Energy was founded in August 2020 by Kunal Girotra. In February 2026 it announced 232 million USD raised across a 130 million USD Series C led by Activate Capital and a 102 million USD Series D led by B Capital and Prelude Ventures, with DCVC, Sunrun and ITOCHU participating. It reports 650 MW of devices under management across multiple continents. ITOCHU holds a Gridshare sales licence in Japan and is a shareholder.