Uplight On the Fast Company’s Best Workplace for Innovators List for the Fifth Year in a Row

Since 2019, Uplight has operated at the grid-edge, meeting load growth and more intense weather not with new supply, but with the Demand Stack®: integrating demand-side programs including demand response, virtual power plants, time-varying rates, and energy efficiency that activate energy customers.

Fast Company named Uplight a Best Workplace for Innovators in 2026 in the Emerging Enterprises category, reflecting on our culture where innovation is infused throughout. Receiving the award for the fifth year in a row demonstrates Uplight’s commitment to building a culture where employees at every level can share ideas and drive creative solutions.

Uplight Shines in Clean Energy Tech Innovation

Partnering with utility leaders, Uplight consistently invests in innovation to meet the needs of a dynamic industry while prioritizing affordability. This year we’ve made progress on turning customer flexibility into a grid resource that utilities can plan around. Some examples of what we’ve been up to this year include:

Making Load Flexibility Dependable

Uplight Demand Stack: Uplight built an integrated framework that runs on a suite of artificial intelligence and machine learning models—covering detection and propensity, disaggregation and bill analytics, measurement and verification, and load forecasting, optimization, and dispatch—that identify and engage eligible customers and then enable utilities to forecast, dispatch, and evaluate these resources at scale.
Predictive Capacity Dispatch (PCD): To make demand response more reliable and reduce customer fatigue, PCD forecasts home-level load 24 hours ahead using smart meter and weather data, then staggers device dispatch for steady demand response. This year we also added group-level targeting and event-length optimization, delivering 36 MW of sustained reduction at 3% prediction error in our first events.

Making Load Flexibility Scalable

Scaled Flex Platform for 3 Million Participants: Uplight engineered and proof-tested a platform capable of dispatching demand response events to 3 million concurrent participants—far beyond the industry’s typical thousands to low hundreds of thousands—enabling utilities to shed or shift massive loads instantly to prevent blackouts, with a major Asian utility deploying this record scale in summer 2026.
Integration Architectures for the DER Ecosystem: In May 2025, Uplight launched a Kafka-based Software Development Kit plus support for the IEEE 2030.5 open standard, giving original equipment manufacturers like battery makers a plug-and-play path to connect their devices to Uplight’s Distributed Energy Resource (DER) management system without custom development—cutting DER onboarding time by 25-40%.

A Collaborative, Flexible Culture

A primary way that Uplight achieves its innovative presence in the clean energy sector is by supporting the company’s employees across all departments, from technology to sales to operations. Uplight has employed several strategies to enhance employee engagement, creativity, and innovation:

Growth and Development: After a six-month 2025 pilot that paired 95 mentors and mentees, Uplight expanded its mentorship program company-wide in May 2026 to reinforce a culture of continuous development.
Community and Belonging: Seven employee resource groups anchor a culture of connection, spotlighted at the third annual ERG Leadership Summit with a two-day virtual event in October 2025 focused on leadership development and community building. At Uplight, we encourage our employees to give back to the community as well. Through TeamUp!, Uplighters logged 129 volunteer hours in 2025 across Earth Day and holiday events in the US and India.
How We Work: Project WoW (Ways of Working) streamlines processes and clarifies ownership across the organization. Additionally, our remote-first roles (supported by offices in Boulder, Boston, and Pune) take advantage of 20-25 days off and generous parental leave to keep teams flexible and supported.

Cultivating a workplace culture where employees feel empowered to innovate is central to Uplight’s mission of accelerating the clean energy ecosystem. Join the Uplight team and learn more about Fast Company’s annual Best Workplaces for Innovators.