Purpose-Built: The Story Behind Claros

In the late 19^th century, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla were locked in a fierce battle to determine whose approach to distributing power—Edison’s direct current (DC) or Tesla’s alternating current (AC)—would prevail. Their rivalry, known as the “War of the Currents,” ignited extraordinary breakthroughs that ultimately led to the electrification of the world.  

But after that transformative era, progress slowed. Even as computing technology has advanced at an astounding pace, the fundamental infrastructure responsible for delivering electricity has largely remained the same.   

“We have not changed the way we’ve been doing electricity transmission for the last 150 years, which has become a serious issue in the age of AI,” said Daniel Kultran, CEO and Co-Founder of the Red Cell portfolio company Claros. “Data centers today are incredibly advanced and more powerful than anything we’ve had before. With AI growing at such a rapid pace, energy demands will only increase, creating an urgent need for more efficient and effective ways to distribute power.”  

To address this challenge, Kultran, alongside Red Cell Founder and CEO Grant Verstandig, co-founded Claros, a power management solutions company that’s reimagining how energy moves through today’s data centers. Launched from stealth in February 2025 with $9.75 million in initial funding from Red Cell, General Catalyst, VIPC, and other investors, Claros is building technologies designed to optimize power delivery, increase compute performance, and maximize efficiency while decreasing energy consumption and lowering costs across AI operations. Since launching, Claros has raised an additional $30 million in Seed funding, co-led by Red Cell and General Catalyst, bringing the total raised to nearly $40 million.

“As AI drives unprecedented growth in data center power demand, electricity consumption could surpass 1,500 TWh by 2030, which is roughly equal to all residential electricity used in the United States in 2025,” said Verstandig. “Meeting that need requires a fundamentally smarter approach to power infrastructure. That’s why we built Claros: to deliver advanced technology that powers the future of AI.”

The industry’s answer to record AI-driven energy demands has been to generate more power by firing up more nuclear and coal plants and the like. But, Kultran notes, creating power is only part of the solution. 

“We also need to start using the power we have far more responsibly than we have been,” said Kultran, who prior to co-founding Claros was the CTO of defense technology company Epirus. “As we build the infrastructure to support AI, we have a significant opportunity to reduce waste, improve performance, and minimize our carbon footprint. This is where Claros comes in. Our mission is to make that power delivery infrastructure significantly more efficient and scalable.”

At the heart of Claros’s mission are two of its flagship products: its integrated voltage regulator (IVR) and Power Gateway™. Together, they address the energy efficiency challenge from end to end, improving power delivery both at the processor level and across the broader system architecture. 

In conventional power delivery approaches, electricity must travel across inches of circuit board before reaching the processor. At data centers, those inches can lead to hundreds of watts being lost per graphics processing unit (GPU), the specialized processors that enable high-performance computing. Across data center facilities housing thousands of GPUs, these losses translate into significant energy waste and operating costs. Claros’s comprehensive approach to power delivery tackles this issue. Its IVR delivers power directly to the point of compute, minimizing transmission distance—from inches to millimeters—to lower heat conversion loss, reduce energy waste, and enable more precise voltage control. Meanwhile, Power Gateway, an 800 VDC intelligent power distribution platform, functions as a sophisticated energy router that enables data center operators to power entire facilities with DC power solutions. By integrating seamlessly with on-site generation and energy systems and reducing both conversion and distribution losses the platform helps to create a more resilient and scalable power architecture capable of supporting the unprecedented demands of AI and next-generation computing workloads.

To date, Claros has fabricated three IVR designs; completed initial hardware and software designs for Power Gateway; and announced its collaboration with Samsung Electronics to scale production of its IVR.

For Kultran, solving complex problems begins with understanding the entire system. A graduate of the University of Southern California with a master’s degree in electrical engineering specializing in electrophysics, he spent decades tackling advanced engineering, power, and semiconductor challenges at leading U.S. companies like Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. Throughout his career, he has taken a holistic approach to innovation, one that now serves as the foundation for Claros.

“When it comes to power delivery, you have to look at problems holistically, considering every link in the entire power-delivery chain, from the grid to the chip,” Kultran said. “That’s what we do at Claros. By addressing the continuum of the power-delivery chain, we can drive greater efficiency and effect the transformative change that the industry has been sorely lacking.”