PRESS RELEASE: Soma Energy, the company using AI to unlock existing grid capacity and accelerate time to power for data centers, today announced it has raised $7 million in seed and pre-seed funding. The seed round was led by Category Ventures, with participation from Haystack, RRE Ventures, TO VC, Uncork Capital, and pre-seed investors Panache Ventures and Walter Kortschak.
Make Every Megawatt Matter
Access to timely, reliable power is becoming the primary limiting factor in scaling the AI economy. BloombergNEFprojects U.S. data center power demand could reach 106 gigawatts (GW) by 2035, while McKinsey forecasts global data center capacity demand will increase 3.5x between 2025 and 2030. However, building the generation, transmission, and interconnection capacity needed to meet rising power demand takes five to ten years to come online, which is fundamentally incompatible with the needs of AI.
Built by the Team That Solved This Problem at AWS
While most energy software companies operate on one side of the grid, Soma Energy does something structurally different. Its energy intelligence platform leverages AI to optimize across both supply and demand in real time.
Soma Energy was founded by the team that built and operated energy systems at Amazon Web Services a decade ago and collectively brings more than 20 years of experience trading power across CAISO, SPP, MISO, PJM, ERCOT, and WECC. CEO Ath Caramanolis created AWS’s renewable energy optimization program, scaling the portfolio to 10 GW and negotiating over $1 billion in deals. He is joined by CTO Mario Souto, Ph.D., who built the machine learning platform used to manage gigawatts of solar, wind, and storage assets at AWS, and Chief AI Scientist Henrique Hoeltgebaum, Ph.D., who brings deep expertise in AI-driven forecasting and anomaly detection for complex energy systems
At AWS, the team worked on the front lines of this market, navigating grid constraints, interconnection delays, and the operational risk of managing power at scale. That experience shaped Soma Energy’s solution from the ground up, rooted in a practical understanding of what large-scale energy users need as they grow.
“We saw and solved these problems at AWS 10 years ago, the grid constraints, the interconnection delays, the complexity of managing power at scale,” said Ath Caramanolis, CEO and Co-Founder, Soma Energy. “We built the company because we knew there was a better way. The answer is not simply more infrastructure, but better orchestration. By applying AI to power plants and large energy loads in real time, we unlock flexibility that already exists and accelerate time to power today.”
Unlocking What Already Exists
Soma Energy’s platform optimizes how distributed energy resources, battery storage, and generation assets interact with the wholesale electricity market. This helps power producers and data centers operate more efficiently, reduce costs, and unlock additional capacity.
The platform unlocks capacity already present in the grid but currently underutilized, delivering power to energy-intensive facilities in months rather than years, at a fraction of the cost of traditional alternatives.
- For data centers, Soma Energy connects on-site generation, storage, and load into a single control layer, transforming large facilities into flexible grid assets. This allows optimization across an individual site or a pool of data centers, unlocking additional capacity from existing infrastructure for faster time to power.
- For power producers, Soma Energy’s real-time dispatch intelligence determines when to generate, store, or trade across wind, solar, and battery assets to lower cost per MWh and reduce price volatility.
“Soma Energy is changing what’s possible for data center growth,” said Josh Simms, CEO, H5 Data Centers. “By coordinating existing resources, we were able to access capacity significantly sooner than expected, accelerating our time to power and removing a critical constraint on expansion.”
Today, the company is optimizing two GW of electricity for power-producing clients and is actively working with five data center customers. The new funding will be used to expand engineering and commercial teams and accelerate deployments across North America.
“Building new generation and upgrading transmission operates on timelines of five to ten years and requires hundreds of billions in capital investment. This timeline is fundamentally incompatible with the pace of AI infrastructure deployment,” said Villi Iltchev, Partner at Category Ventures. “Having managed hyperscale power systems firsthand, the founders built Soma Energy as if they were the customer themselves, grounded in the operational realities of grid constraints, procurement friction, and market volatility.”
About Soma Energy
Soma Energy unlocks existing grid capacity to power the AI economy, accelerating time to power and building a more flexible, resilient grid. One megawatt at a time. Founded by veterans of AWS and leading AI research institutions, the company’s platform optimizes power plants and loads in real time while helping data centers scale faster and power producers earn more.
Media Contact:
Michael Celiceo, CodePR
michaelc@codepr.com
