We’re excited to share that Uplight has been recognized on Fast Company’s 2025 Best Workplaces for Innovators list in the Flexible Workplace for Innovation category! This recognition highlights organizations that foster innovation through flexible work arrangements—a core part of how we operate at Uplight.
At Uplight, fostering a workplace culture where employees feel empowered to innovate is central to our mission. Almost all Uplight positions are remote-first, allowing employees the freedom to work from anywhere in the U.S.—which eliminates commuting stress, provides extra time in the day for errands and childcare, and allows employees to work from places and at times they feel the most productive.
At the same time, Uplight recognizes the power of in-person teamwork in accelerating our ability to innovate and build community. Our Boulder office acts as a hub for team and pillar meetings where employees across the world can access, with additional office spaces in Boston and Pune, India for collaboration and employee connection.
Recent Innovation: Predictive Capacity Dispatch
In 2023, one of our utility clients requested a solution to meet energy traders’ needs for consistent load shift during demand response (DR) events. This began a multi-year collaboration with the client, bringing together Uplight’s product management, software engineering, data science, account management, sales, and operations teams to work to improve the reliability of thermostat DR.
By analyzing historical datasets, Uplight’s intelligent orchestration team created a predictive model of load shift curves for distinct customer profiles. They established subgroups of customers within the client’s portfolio and applied a novel dispatch strategy that staggered the start times for every subgroup during DR events. The result was Predictive Capacity Dispatch (PCD)—a suite of advanced tools that enable utility clients to forecast DR event performance on a day-ahead basis and deliver a consistent load shift over a four-hour peak demand period.
PCD’s pilot in 2024 was a success, and positioned the technology for scale in 2025: clients saw 97% accuracy in event performance predictions, less than 5% variability in per-hour load shift performance, and an average 15% reduction in opt-out rates during the summer season. With PCD, utilities can treat demand response as a predictable, controllable capacity resource rather than an unpredictable grid asset.
Culture of Innovation: Strategic Investment in Process
Over the past year, we have made significant investments to enhance our data architecture, technology, and organizational structure to drive efficiency, improve analytics, and foster a culture of continuous innovation.
We launched a company-wide initiative to establish a lakehouse architecture—an integrated framework combining data lakes, warehouses, and machine learning systems. This architecture enhances data accessibility, governance, and reliability, enabling more efficient product development and customer insights.
We also invested in Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) to create standardized “golden paths”—reusable templates and standards to reduce cognitive load during development and drive consistency across solutions for analytic service development. These frameworks allow engineering teams to deploy ML models—including bill analytics and usage disaggregation, detection and propensity, and measurement and verification—-more quickly and at lower cost, enabling broader participation in analytics development and significantly improving the speed at which we can launch and iterate on new solutions.
Building Community Across Continents
At Uplight, we know that innovation cannot exist without inclusion. We’ve established seven Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) to support diverse communities within our organization. Annually, Uplight hosts an ERG Leadership Summit, bringing together ERG leaders and executive sponsors for leadership development, team building and community, and DEI strategy and growth.
Additionally, as a certified B-Corp, Uplight encourages every employee to volunteer a minimum of 8 hours per year—no time off necessary. In 2024, Uplighters volunteered for a total of 250 hours, participating in seven holiday volunteer events held all over the US. By offering organized volunteer opportunities through the TeamUp! Volunteer program, Uplighters can give back to their communities, strengthen relationships with coworkers, and return to work feeling re-energized.
As demand for our products grows with increasing electrification and grid complexity, we continue refining our data strategies, AI and ML capabilities, and cross-functional collaboration. We’re proud to be among the organizations proving that flexible, inclusive workplaces drive meaningful innovation in clean energy.
