Born in 2012 with roots in Volt/VAR Optimization, back when grid tech still felt like it belonged to your dad’s basement workshop, Utilidata has evolved into a full-blown edge AI powerhouse. You don’t pivot from software for substations to embedding real-time AI into millions of smart meters unless you know how to read the currents beneath the current. They didn’t just catch the wave of grid modernization, they became the undertow pulling the industry forward.
Fast forward to today: Utilidata just locked in $60.3 million in Series C funding, led by Renown Capital Partners, with heavyweight hitters like NVIDIA, Quanta Services, Inc., and Keyframe Capital doubling down. That brings the total haul to a cool $95.3 million. No empty calories here, just pure muscle aimed at expanding Karman, their AI platform built on a custom NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano module that trains, processes, and acts, all right at the grid edge.
Josh Brumberger, Utilidata’s CEO, knows this isn’t about "smarter meters", it's about shifting the entire center of gravity in energy. His background in government and energy policy turned out to be less about navigating bureaucracy and more about dismantling it. Then you have CTO Marissa Hummon, PhD, a Harvard-trained physicist whose brain runs hotter than a substation transformer on a July afternoon. Together, with President & COO Jess Melanson and Chief Experience Officer Theresa Gilbert, they’re running a playbook most utilities didn’t even know they needed.
The grid isn’t a polite houseguest anymore, it’s a hungry animal with new habits: EVs in the driveway, solar panels on the roof, AI on the brain. Utilidata’s Karman platform speaks that wild dialect in real time, making sure the lights stay on without breaking the system, or the bank.
Winning U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) awards, stacking partnerships with names like Aclara, Portland General Electric, and Deloitte, and gearing up to move from just utilities into data centers, Utilidata is showing what happens when you stop trying to control complexity and start making it your co-pilot.
This isn't some plastic IPO shuffle. It's a team of 92 (and growing by 24% year-over-year) chasing a $3.5 billion DOE initiative, and a much bigger global energy revolution, by doing the work that most of the industry still calls "future state."
Utilidata is scaling fast, stacking real-world deployments, and, if the story continues the way it’s starting to sound, may just rewire how the world thinks about electricity itself.
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