Drew Baglino
Drew Baglino is the founder and CEO of Heron Power, a clean-energy hardware company he established after an 18-year career at Tesla, where he served as Senior Vice President of Powertrain and Energy and led programs including Megapack, Powerwall, and the 4680 battery cell manufacturing facility in Texas. Heron Power develops solid-state transformers—branded Heron Link—designed to replace conventional steel, oil, and copper transformer hardware in power conversion applications at data centers, solar installations, and grid-scale battery projects. In February 2026 the company closed a $140 million Series B co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Breakthrough Energy Ventures to fund a planned 40 GW U.S. manufacturing facility, with field demonstrations targeted for mid-2026 and full-scale production in the second half of 2027.
“Even though there's so much innovation happening at the edge of the grid, on the other side of the wire, there's really been no change. The systems underpinning the grid today are the same largely mechanical systems that were developed over 100 years ago.”
Source→“At Heron Power, we're focused on building solid-state transformers to use silicon and software to replace steel, oil, and copper in power conversion at data centers, large-scale energy installations like solar and battery projects and others.”
Source→“First large factory (approx. 500 jobs) in build-out phase.”
Source→“Founder and CEO of Heron Power. Former 18-year Tesla veteran who led Powertrain, Energy (responsible for Megapack), and built the 4680 battery manufacturing program in Texas (50 GWh facility) and the Megapack megafactory in Lathrop, California.”
Source→“Participants: Drew Baglino, Erin Price-Wright, Turner Caldwell”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.