Sara El Baghdadi is Co-Founder and CEO of Ryhla (YC F26), a startup that builds models of the power distribution grid to get solar, battery, EV charging and small data center projects connected faster.

Sara studied at École Polytechnique and Stanford, earning two master's degrees in electrical and computational engineering. She researched foundation models for power grid time series at Stanford and also placed on the podium at an xAI hackathon.

Sara and her co-founder Yassine Guennoun have been best friends since middle school in Morocco, a country betting big on solar. They moved to the US together for Stanford and went through Y Combinator side by side.

Ryhla first deployed its models with utilities, which gave the team a deep understanding of how interconnection works in practice. The company is now part of Y Combinator's Fall 2026 batch and is based in San Francisco.

Ryhla's models cover utilities across states including California, Texas, New York, Illinois and Virginia. Developers use them to choose sites, pick the feeder and size 1 to 50 MW projects before filing, aiming to interconnect faster and at lower cost.