Asia Edition ·
She left a comfortable utility job, borrowed against her flat in Chennai and spent three years building batteries nobody asked for. Now Tidewater Grid keeps the lights on in 40 cities.
Arjun Rathore inherited a sleepy mill. Five years later it supplies three of the world's biggest sportswear brands.
A 60-person startup thinks the next billion internet users won't type in English, and investors agree.
How a former utility engineer turned grid-scale batteries into one of Asia's most valuable private energy companies, and why the world's biggest investors are now lining up to meet her.
The round values the Chennai-based company at $9.2 billion and will fund new manufacturing capacity in Tamil Nadu.
Read release →Farmers can now get weather, pricing and pest alerts by speaking to the app in their own language.
Read release →Shoppers will be able to split purchases into interest-free installments at checkout across Asia.
Read release →Tanaka, who co-founded the company's research division, succeeds the founding CEO, who becomes chairman.
Read release →The logistics startup plans 120 new temperature-controlled warehouses over the next two years.
Read release →The model is free for researchers and startups, with an enterprise version for banks and governments.
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Kavya Iyer built a $9 billion grid empire without a single press release. Now everyone wants a meeting.
At 6:40 on a humid Tuesday evening, as air conditioners across Chennai switch on almost in unison, a warehouse on the city's western edge begins to hum. Inside, rows of steel cabinets the size of shipping containers start releasing electricity they quietly stored at noon, when solar panels across the state were producing more power than anyone could use. Nobody in the city notices. That is exactly the point.
The cabinets belong to Tidewater Grid, a company most people in India have never heard of. Its founder, Kavya Iyer, 41, prefers it that way. She has never issued a press release, rarely speaks at conferences and turned down every interview request for six years. Yet Tidewater now stores and dispatches power for utilities in 40 cities, and its latest funding round values it at $9.2 billion, making Iyer's 31% stake worth roughly $2.8 billion.
Iyer spent a decade as a grid engineer at a state utility, where she watched the same problem repeat every summer. Renewable plants produced the most power in the afternoon. Demand peaked after sunset. In between, cheap clean electricity was simply wasted, while expensive coal plants were fired up to cover the evening rush.
"Everyone wanted to build the power plant," she says, sitting in a spare conference room with a whiteboard still covered in last week's calculations. "I wanted to own the moment the power is actually needed."
In 2018 she quit, borrowed against her flat and hired four engineers. For three years, Tidewater sold almost nothing. Utilities saw batteries as a lab experiment. Investors wanted software margins, not steel and lithium.
"Patience is a strategy. Most people just can't afford it, so I made sure I could."
The break came in 2021, when a heatwave pushed northern India's grid to the edge. One mid-sized utility that had reluctantly installed a Tidewater pilot was the only one in its region to avoid rolling blackouts. Within a year, eleven more had signed contracts.
Iyer's real insight was the business model. Instead of selling batteries, Tidewater owns and operates them, charging utilities a fee for reliability. Revenue is recurring, contracts run 15 years, and every new city adds data that makes the company's dispatch software smarter.
The new $420 million round will fund a second factory and an expansion into Southeast Asia, where island grids face the same afternoon-surplus, evening-shortage problem. Rivals backed by some of the region's largest conglomerates are now racing into the market Iyer spent years building alone.
She seems unbothered. "Competition means we were right," she says, capping her marker. "Now we just have to stay faster than people with more money than us. I've done that before."
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