Amit Narayan

Amit Narayan

Dr. Narayan is an innovator and a serial entrepreneur who has successfully built and sold multiple technology companies in his career.  

Currently, Dr. Narayan serves as the Founder and CEO of Aina Climate AI Ventures, a venture fund and company creation studio dedicated to catalyzing and accelerating climate solutions utilizing generative artificial intelligence. In addition, Dr. Narayan is also the CEO and Chairman of GridCARE, a Climate AI Ventures portfolio company, which is working on Artificial Intelligence applications for the Electric Grid.  

Previously, Dr. Narayan was the Founder and CEO of AutoGrid where he led the company from its inception in 2012 to successful acquisition by Schneider Electric in 2022. Under his leadership, AutoGrid Flex was ranked #1 platform for Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) and Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) for several years and was adopted in 20 countries managing over 8,000 MW of assets. Prior to AutoGrid, Dr. Narayan was the Director of Smart Grid Research at Stanford University where he conducted research in optimizing modern power systems with high penetration of renewables and distributed energy resources.  

Before starting his work in the energy industry, Dr. Narayan worked in the semiconductor electronic design automation industry where he served as the Vice President of Products at publicly traded Magma Design Automation (acquired by Synopsys, Nasdaq: SNPS) and was the Founder of Berkeley Design Automation (acquired by Mentor Graphics, now a part of Siemens). It is estimated over 1/3rd of all advanced semiconductor chips in the world were designed using the software developed by Dr. Narayan's team and his products were adopted by over 100 leading semiconductor companies across the world.  

Dr. Narayan's work has been recognized with several awards, including Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum, Bloomberg New Energy Pioneer, and the EDN’s Innovation for the Year. In addition, Dr. Narayan is an active advisor, mentor, investor and board member to several companies in Silicon Valley.  

Dr. Narayan received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur.