Rune is placing modular data centers directly onto solar farms and wind installations, turning what grid operators typically throw away into revenue. The Palo Alto startup, backed by Lowercarbon Capital and, according to the company, Union Square Ventures and the Danish wind-turbine manufacturer Vestas, has built a business around consuming electricity that renewable plants would otherwise be forced to curtail.
CEO William Layden confirmed the investor lineup in February, and an industry newsletter reported in June that the company had closed an oversubscribed funding round. The amount remains undisclosed. Rune, which operates under the legal name Liitto Technology, previously raised $5.6 million and $4.75 million in separate rounds, according to SEC filings from mid-2024 and 2025. Earlier backers include Silicon Catalyst and Mission One Capital, CB Insights data shows.
The model addresses a persistent frustration in renewable energy: grid operators routinely order wind and solar plants to dump power during periods of transmission congestion or slack demand. In 2024 alone, California's grid operator curtailed 3.4 million megawatt-hours of wind and solar generation, according to Energy Information Administration figures published in 2025. ERCOT, the Texas grid manager, saw 4,585 gigawatt-hours of solar curtailment in 2024, representing just over five percent of production, a September 2024 study found.
Rune's approach involves deploying what it calls RELIC units—Renewable Energy Linked Interruptible Compute—at the plants themselves. These fully DC-powered modules tap only electricity that would have been wasted, responding to operator commands in under 100 milliseconds. The company claims installation can happen in as little as 30 minutes. The units accommodate up to 1,500-volt DC bus connections and handle AI training, inference workloads and bitcoin mining.
"We are effectively solving the nodal pricing problem by bringing the customer to the combiner box," Layden told the industry publication Solarplaza in May. Translation: rather than transmitting excess power across congested lines to distant data centers, Rune places the computing load at the source.
As of March, the company reported operating three sites: a solar farm somewhere in Texas, a solar installation in Chile's Atacama Desert and a wind farm in Sweden, according to a legal analysis by the firm Troutman Pepper that quoted Layden. He told Solarplaza that co-locating the data centers typically boosts plant revenue by 10 to 20 percent.
Rachel Sacknoff, Rune's head of commercial strategy and a former executive at Macquarie and data-center developer Aligned, framed the benefit to grid operators in straightforward terms. "We enhance grid operations because, as we consume curtailed power, there's less congestion at the point of interconnection," she told Troutman Pepper in March.
Layden brings an unusual background to the role. He previously ran SoftBank Energy's clean-power data center initiative and before that founded a hydropower bitcoin mining operation with Cube Hydro, according to Lowercarbon Capital's portfolio page. Co-founder and chief technology officer Varun Palivela worked in chip design at Qualcomm, Nuvia and Arm.
The timing may favor Rune's pitch. US data-center power demand is expected to more than double, reaching 106 gigawatts by 2035, Bloomberg NEF said in March. Meanwhile, the supply of curtailed renewable energy keeps expanding as more solar and wind projects come online faster than transmission infrastructure can keep pace.
Competition in the space is taking shape. Soluna operates renewable-computing sites alongside wind and solar projects and has pivoted from bitcoin hosting toward AI campuses, according to the company's Q1 2026 updates. Crusoe builds modular AI infrastructure at energy sites. Lancium, based in Houston, runs controllable load resources within the ERCOT market.
Rune is currently hiring software engineers for energy infrastructure control systems, a Lowercarbon job board listing updated in July indicates. Whether the company can scale beyond its initial three sites remains an open question, though the investor lineup suggests confidence in the concept. For renewable developers watching revenue evaporate during curtailment events, the proposition is simple enough: let someone else capture what you're being paid to discard.
