There's a certain kind of entrepreneur drawn to Texas electricity markets—the kind who sees volatility where others see risk, who looks at ERCOT's price spikes and thinks not "crisis" but "opportunity." Francisco Enriquez appears to be one of them.
His startup, Fractal Power, just closed a $9,849,997 seed round, according to a Form D filing that landed with the SEC on February 6, 2026. The New York-based company is building utility-scale battery storage across Texas while simultaneously running proprietary algorithms to trade power. It's a dual bet: that ERCOT's market chaos isn't going away, and that software can squeeze profit from it.
The financing came in two pieces. Series Seed-1 Preferred Stock brought in $7.2 million in fresh capital. Another $2.65 million converted from existing SAFEs into Series Seed-2 Preferred Stock. Eight investors participated in the round, which closed its first tranche on January 30, though the filing doesn't name them. Enriquez, who serves as CEO, signed the paperwork.
Stacking Revenue Streams
What Fractal Power is attempting isn't exactly simple. The company positions itself as vertically integrated, handling everything from site selection and land deals to construction, ownership, and operations of grid-scale battery systems. Then it layers on algorithmic dispatch and what it calls "asset-backed power trading."
The pitch: stack multiple revenue streams—energy arbitrage, ancillary services, locational spread capture—across distributed battery sites positioned at what the company believes are high-volatility nodes in ERCOT's grid. Whether that thesis holds up in practice remains to be seen.
Fractal's website lists a pipeline of multiple sites of 26 MWh capacity each spread across five Texas counties: Wilbarger, McCulloch, Hidalgo, Lubbock, and Frio. Commercial operation dates range from the fourth quarter of this year through the third quarter of 2027. Recent job postings for quant researchers focused on energy trading and optimization suggest the company is building out an in-house trading desk, not just buying batteries and hoping for the best.
The Texas Storage Rush
Fractal is entering a market that's become something of a proving ground—and a battleground—for battery plays. ERCOT added more than 16,000 MW of new supply in 2025, mostly from storage and solar, according to the grid operator's annual report published in March 2026. Perhaps more striking: active interconnection requests hit 450,306 MW as of January, up 15.6 percent from the prior year. Over 70 percent of that queue is tied to large loads like data centers and crypto mining operations.
In other words, the grid is bracing for unprecedented demand even as batteries proliferate.
Fractal faces well-capitalized competition. Spearmint Energy, for instance, secured more than $250 million in financing for 400 MWh of ERCOT storage projects just last month. Gridmatic, another algorithmic battery operator, claims to run the top-performing battery in California's CAISO market. Adjacent startups are circling similar themes: Derapi raised $7 million in March for DER connectivity APIs; AGent Energy pulled in $6 million last August for AI-driven distributed generation. The pattern is clear—software-meets-hardware infrastructure plays are having a moment.
Whether the moment lasts is another question entirely.
The Man Behind the Algorithms
Enriquez brings an interesting resume. A Stanford Graduate School of Business alum, he previously co-founded a construction software company and served as managing director at a Texas infrastructure think tank. He now sits on the board of the Texas Solar + Storage Association, a role that presumably offers useful visibility into policy and market dynamics. The company operates from dual headquarters: 11 Park Place in New York and an office in Austin. LinkedIn pegs the team size somewhere between two and ten employees, though exact headcount fluctuates.
With seed capital now in the bank and a pipeline of projects slated to go live in the coming quarters, Fractal Power is positioning to answer a specific question: Can data-driven site selection paired with algorithmic trading actually produce sustainable economics in one of the country's most volatile—some would say unhinged—power markets?
The thesis is elegant. Execution, as always, is harder. And in ERCOT, the only guarantee is that nothing stays predictable for long.
