An Australian energy technology company that has helped identify new capacity on local grids has raised another $90 million to fund an expansion of its AI and machine learning products which could prove crucial to the pace of the green energy transition.
Software company Neara builds three dimensional models of networks, maps which reveal previously unseen capacity that helps better plan where new generation should be built, where data centres could best be placed, and how to handle ageing grids.
Its latest capital raise, led by US private equity firm TCV, speeds up an expansion in Europe and the US, where 90 per cent of the company’s revenue comes from. It also gives the company, founded just 10 years ago, a valuation of $1.1 billion.
The data centre boom combined with the rise and rise of AI is good timing for launching the company’s modelling technology into rail, telecommunications, data centres and insurance, says co-founder Jack Curtis.
“We’re playing at the epicentre of several of the biggest macro growth trends in the world right now,” he told Renew Economy.
“[We have a] footprint in the US and Europe that’s expanding quickly, and a very strong market position in Australia.
“That translates to a bigger spend on products and with that comes a big focus on software engineers, machine learning engineers. So about 70-80 per cent of [the new funds] is people spend focused on products engineering, AI and machine learning.”
Power grids around the world, built for a different era, are beginning to reach their limits as to what they can do when faced with rising electrification and massive new demand from AI and data centres.
While rail and telecommunications may seem tangential to the company’s core energy story, “a lot of it circles back to energy and access to energy” Curtis says.
“If you can’t power something, it’s hard to do something with it.”
Neara’s technology is currently being used in the US, Europe and Australia.
The company says it’s modelled some 15 million assets in four continents, and this reach is allowing network companies to identify reliability issues sooner and build new infrastructure 85 per cent faster by consolidating the data needed to plan and build into one platform.
TCV may have led the round, but existing investors Partners Group, EQT, Square Peg Capital, and Skip Capital also bought back in.
TCV general partner Muz Ashraf said the problems of climate change and data centres’ need for energy require a new way of organising grids and energy flows.
“Neara’s highly differentiated, physics-enabled digital twin platform is a leap forward in how utilities manage their grids,” he said in a statement.
Three years ago Neara estimated some 10 gigawatts of capacity was lying unused in Australia’s electricity distribution networks.
Today, the company says the problem is that infrastructure is being pushed closer to the physical limits of what it can do due to disasters, heat waves, and more demand.
The problem, as Neara sees it, is that educated guesses and statistical models are no longer good enough options to deal with the challenges of managing a modern grid.
Data centres are one example and similar in terms of the grid access and planing issues that still bedevil the renewable energy sector.
But unlike electricity generation, Curtis sees the data centre opportunity as more of a space race with an “existential tipping point” — data centres can be hosted anywhere and if countries that can’t fix grid access and planning issues will miss out.
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