The FleX Factor, a high-energy showdown where innovation meets entertainment, brings the brightest minds in the Flexible Demand Management Industry to the FLEXCON stage. Industry innovators will pitch their game-changing solutions to a panel of judges and to you – the audience, in a live, interactive format. Cast your vote, cheer on your favourites, and help decide who truly has the ultimate FleX Factor!
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Meet the 2026 Judges
Ben Krikler
Director of Research & Innovation and Head, Energised Futures, Centrica
A physicist and technologist turned social entrepreneur, Ben joined Centrica as Director of Research & Innovation in 2022 to accelerate research and innovation. Fusing academia with entrepreneurship, Ben launched Energised Futures, powered by Centrica in the summer of 2024. With a PhD from Imperial College London, working on the COMET experiment in Japan, and postdoc research with the University of Bristol, Ben pivoted from academia to entrepreneurialism, as co-founder and CEO of RemotelyGreen, a platform to make online events a truly sociable alternative to travel. Bringing world-class research and visionary commercialism, Ben is leading the Energised Futures team with expertise and laser focus to truly accelerate a new energy future.
Daria Ekimova
Senior Energy Analyst, Gridcog
Daria Ekimova is a Senior Energy Analyst at Gridcog, based in Berlin, helping clients navigate complex energy modelling projects across Europe. She previously worked as a Market Intelligence Manager at 1KOMMA5° and as a Power Markets Analyst at Aurora Energy Research, building deep expertise in European power markets. She holds an MSc in Management and Technology from TU Munich, with research experience at MIT’s CEEPR. She is passionate about energy systems that support a just and sustainable energy transition.
Angie Castillo
Director of European Market Operations, OakTree Power
Angie Castillo is a specialist in data-driven operational excellence and technology-led transformation within the European energy sector. As Director of Operations for Europe at OakTree Power, she develops and executes demand response and load optimisation strategies that maximise value from flexible loads and grid-edge assets. She aggregates and deploys client flexibility into capacity and ancillary service markets, helping balance renewable intermittency and deliver reliable grid services. With deep expertise in flexibility market operations, regulatory compliance and risk management for behind-the-meter portfolios, Angie combines commercial insight with technical optimisation. She is skilled at gathering requirements through structured workshops and analytics, influencing senior stakeholders, and driving digital solutions that align with organisational culture and risk appetite.
Delphine Faivre
Chief of Staff, Elax Energie
After covering the residential flexibility ecosystem as a VC investor at EDF Pulse Ventures in London, Delphine crossed the Channel to join Elax Energie as Chief of Staff. Now, she focuses on scaling the company’s proven model beyond social housing to make demand-side flexibility mainstream.
2026 Pitchers
Gridual is a KU Leuven spin-off building the behind-the-meter optimization layer for commercial and industrial flexibility.
Instead of optimizing flexibility at portfolio level, Gridual continuously optimize each site locally, considering injection and offtake context. They balance self-consumption against day-ahead, intraday, and imbalance market value to capture the full economic potential of every kWh from batteries to PV, wind, and EV chargers. With their disruptive business model, they only win when their clients win: through a net profit share, they account for every cost impact, from capacity tariffs to supplier margins, to calculate the true net value of their optimization. Gridual only take a fee when demonstrating a real bottom-line improvement.
Heatify designs, builds, and operates collective heat pump systems for large buildings, with a focus on minimizing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
Their software continuously optimizes the operation of their heat pump installations for energy efficiency and demand flexibility. This has allowed one of their projects in Kortrijk to have the highest efficiency recorded in Europe in 2024 (as seen on heatpumpmonitor.org). Through a Heat-as-a-Service model, in which they sell the heat instead of the equipment, Heatify redistributes the created value through co-financing and reduced energy bills.
Their first 20,000m² building (>500 kW) is up and running in Antwerp, they have around 60,000m² in the pipeline, and plan to scale to other European countries in 2027.
Nogara Technologies is a Spanish technology company developing advanced power electronics and power line communication (PLC) solutions for the energy sector. Their technology creates an intelligent communication and control layer behind the meter, enabling energy devices such as EV chargers, heat pumps, batteries, rooftop PV systems and other flexible loads to communicate over the existing electrical wiring. This allows energy consumption, generation and flexibility to be monitored and actively managed without requiring additional communication infrastructure.
Everyone working on residential flex has met the “DSO says no” wall. Part of that is regulatory — but the core of it is that the average DSO lacks the technical means to support low-voltage flex, and the flex world often underestimates how hard that challenge is. Orion Grid Technologies closes that gap, working at the crossroads of power-system engineering and AI. From smart meter data and grid GIS data, it determines which household is connected to which cable, forecasts congestion in the low-voltage grid even where smart meters are scarce, and calculates how much flex can be activated without causing local congestion. In short: the tech that helps DSOs say yes. Orion is a spin-off of VITO, KU Leuven and EnergyVille, built on a decade of R&D and founded in late 2025. Based in Genk, it has systems in operation at DSOs in Belgium and Germany.
