INVESTMENT ACTIVITY
New York firm leads $36m grid technology raising
New York growth capital firm Insight Partners has led a $US26 million ($36 million) Series B funding round for Gridsight, a start-up that has developed smart capacity management technology for electricity grids.
Gridsight’s AI technology enables a power utility to develop a digital twin of its networks which can be used to model supply and demand. The technology is being used in Australia by Endeavour Energy, Essential Energy and SA Power Networks while in the US it has so far been taken up by Xcel Energy and Avangrid.
The funding round, which has been estimated to value the company at up to $200 million, has been supported by Airtree Ventures which led Gridsight’s $US4.5 million Series A round last year.
The new funding will be used primarily for Sydney-based Gridsight to focus on gaining new customers in the US market.
Gridsight was founded in 2020 by Brendan Banfield, Kurt Walcom and Hugh Chan. Banfield and Walkom are childhood friends from Goulburn, NSW, while Walkom met Chan at the University of NSW.
Chief executive Banfield said: “We’ve built our own hybrid AI model that really understands the physics of the network. It can understand the capacity at any point of the network, and how it would be impacted by adding new loads.”
Endeavour Energy chief executive Danny Cooper said his company had been working with Gridsight since 2021 and had used its technology to plan and manage its network of rooftop solar panels.
“We’ve doubled customers’ solar export capacity within our existing poles and wires,” Cooper said. This, he added, meant the grid was now operating closer to its full potential.
Another Australian power network digital twin technology company, Neara, in which Square Peg, Skip Capital and Grok Ventures were early investors, achieved a billion dollar “unicorn” valuation in February with Silicon Valley growth capital firm TCV leading its $90 million Series D fundraising.
Neara’s technology uses 3D imaging to predict what will happen in situations such as wildfires or extreme weather.
According to Walkom, Australia is a suitable market for developing power networks innovation because of rapid and widespread adoption of rooftop solar and subsequent uptake of batteries. “The decentralised network of the future is being lived here first and that decentralisation creates heaps of complexity which then creates a need to do things differently,” he said.
Xcel Energy, which operates in eight states, is Gridsight’s biggest US deal so far. The company’s senior vice president of electricity distribution, Todd Conner, said: “Gridsight is now an integral part of how our distribution team operate and plan, turning data our network produces into intelligence our engineers can act on. A complexity in our distribution system continues to grow [it] helps us make rapid decisions to safely get the most out of our existing grid.”
Image: Endeavour Energy has used Gridsight’s technology to plan and manage its network of rooftop solar panels.