Balachandar Ramamurthy is Co-Founder and CEO at Critical Loop, an energy infrastructure company providing portable power solutions and predictive energy management software. Critical Loop is tackling grid capacity challenges with relocatable battery systems and intelligent automation.

Bala served as Director of Flight Safety at SpaceX where he led the human-rating of Falcon 9 and was launch chief engineer for Crew Demo-2, the first US astronaut mission to orbit since the Space Shuttle. He spent over a decade at SpaceX working on reliability engineering, trajectory analysis, and flight safety.

Bala is a recipient of the Robert H. Goddard Memorial Trophy, Eagle Manned Mission Award, NASA Exceptional Public Service Medal, and Karman Fellowship. He previously co-founded a company focused on antimatter applications and led an open-source lunar lander project.

Critical Loop raised 3.82M and was part of Alchemist Accelerator in 2023. The company deployed its first major project with San Diego International Airport, making it the first US airport to operationalize campus-wide automated power optimization.

Critical Loop's platform manages battery energy storage systems with machine learning forecasting to reduce peak demand and costs while supporting grid resilience. The company serves critical infrastructure, EV charging stations, data centers, and manufacturing facilities across California.