Abhay Gupta

Co-Founder & CEO Bidgely

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Abhay Gupta co-founded Bidgely with Vivek Garud around 2010-2011 on a deceptively simple technical premise: that the single aggregate number a smart meter reports every fifteen minutes contains, hidden inside it, a complete account of what every appliance in the house is doing. Disaggregation — pulling the electric vehicle, the heat pump, the pool pump and the failing refrigerator back out of one summed signal, without installing any hardware in the home — turns a billing instrument into a diagnostic one. That insight has proved to be worth far more than the customer-engagement product it was first sold as. Bidgely’s platform is now used by roughly forty utility partners reaching some thirty million customers, and spans demand-side management, load flexibility, electrification programmes, grid planning, affordability initiatives and energy theft detection, which is to say most of the problems a utility faces as its load shifts from predictable residential demand to EVs and electrified heating. Gupta arrived at the problem from semiconductors and networking rather than from energy policy: an IIT Delhi electrical engineering degree, a master’s from USC, hardware roles at Sun Microsystems and Broadcom, and then the smart-grid product work at Echelon and Grid Net that showed him what the meter data could do and that nobody was doing it. He was named a finalist for Chief Trailblazer of the Year at the 2025 S&P Platts Global Energy Awards.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Bidgely with Vivek Garud and has led it as chief executive for roughly fifteen years.
• Built the company’s appliance-level disaggregation technology into a platform used by around 40 utility partners reaching approximately 30 million customers.
• Named a finalist for Chief Trailblazer of the Year at the 2025 S&P Platts Global Energy Awards, announced in November 2025.
• Expanded the product from customer engagement into demand-side management, load flexibility, electrification, grid planning, affordability programmes and energy theft detection.
• Assembled a full executive bench including a president and chief revenue officer, chief product and technology officer, chief operating officer and a dedicated VP of regulatory affairs — the last a sign of how far into utility programme delivery the company now sits.
• Member of the Forbes Technology Council.
• Holds degrees from IIT Delhi, the University of Southern California and Santa Clara University.

Professional Journey

Gupta trained as an electrical engineer, taking a B.Tech at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and a master’s in electrical engineering at the University of Southern California. His early career was in silicon and systems: he was a hardware engineering manager at Sun Microsystems around 2003-2004, then a senior staff design engineer at Broadcom. This is the deepest layer of the technology stack, and it matters for what came later — disaggregation is fundamentally a signal-processing problem, and the people who solve it well tend to be the ones who understand what a signal is before they understand what a utility is.

In 2005 he moved to Echelon Corporation, a company that had spent two decades building networked control for power lines and buildings, where he worked in product management and business development for about four years. This was the transition from building components to defining products, and it put him inside the smart-metering industry at exactly the point when utilities in Europe and North America were beginning large-scale advanced metering infrastructure rollouts. He also took an MBA in marketing management at Santa Clara University, filling in the commercial half of the discipline.

From 2009 to 2011 he was director of product management at Grid Net, a smart-grid networking software company. That role is the hinge of his career. Utilities were installing tens of millions of smart meters, at enormous expense, justified largely on the basis of not having to send someone to read them. The meters were generating a continuous stream of interval data that nobody was doing anything meaningful with. Gupta’s conclusion was that the data was the asset and the meter reading was the by-product.

He co-founded Bidgely with Vivek Garud on that thesis — sources place the founding at 2010 or 2011 and disagree. The technical claim was aggressive for its time: that machine learning on whole-home interval data could identify individual appliance loads without any submetering, sensors or in-home hardware. If true, it meant a utility could tell a customer precisely why their bill had risen, could identify which homes had just acquired an electric vehicle or a heat pump, and could target efficiency and demand-response programmes at the households where they would actually work — all from data it was already collecting.

The first decade was spent proving it and selling it as customer engagement, which is where utility budgets for such things sat. The product’s real value emerged as the grid changed underneath it. Electrification turned appliance-level visibility from a nice-to-have into planning infrastructure: a utility that cannot see where EV charging is concentrating cannot plan distribution upgrades, and one that cannot identify electrification candidates cannot run a programme to them. Bidgely’s platform expanded accordingly into demand-side management, load flexibility, grid planning and affordability work, and into energy theft detection — a use of the same disaggregation engine that has nothing to do with customer engagement at all, and which pays for itself directly.

Bidgely today works with around forty utility partners reaching roughly thirty million customers from its base in Los Altos, California, with an engineering organisation in India. Gupta has built out a full senior team around him, including a president and chief revenue officer, a chief product and technology officer, a chief operating officer and a VP of regulatory affairs — the last reflecting that the company’s products are now embedded in rate-funded utility programmes subject to regulatory approval rather than sold as software. He sits on the Forbes Technology Council, and in November 2025 was named a finalist for Chief Trailblazer of the Year at the S&P Platts Global Energy Awards, the sector’s most prominent recognition, which he did not win but which placed him among the named candidates.

Education

Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

B.Tech, Electrical Engineering

University of Southern California

MSEE, Electrical Engineering

Santa Clara University

MBA, Marketing Management