The first time Tim Bedford heard of grid monitoring company Gridware, he was working in operations strategy helping to develop PG&E’s wildfire program.
It was 2023, and Gridware, founded three years earlier, was about to run a pilot with the utility, installing roughly 450 of its Gridscope sensors on poles across the Northern California utility’s territory. The devices would monitor vibration, sound, and the electrical field around each pole, helping the utility find faults on its lines faster.
But Bedford was skeptical. “I was not a believer,” he told Latitude Media. “This is too good to be true.”
In his long career at PG&E, which he’d started over 30 years ago as a student hire, Bedford had held many roles, including lineman. From the field, he’d witnessed several similar-looking sensors try and fail to deliver what they promised.
“Sensors that attach directly to the line will give you a sectional line that may be three miles,” he said. “But it never got…to the level that the field was able to get the usable information. They told us about it, but we saw no benefit on the side of the field.”
This time, however, Bedford was so impressed with what he thought was “lifesaving stuff” that he not only kept implementing Gridware’s technology for PG&E, but when he retired from the utility two years later, he became the company’s principal customer success manager.
Gridware is part of a growing group of companies developing tools that give utilities better visibility into their tens of thousands of miles of transmission and distribution lines, allowing them to detect faults and respond faster. These technologies are becoming a critical part of utilities’ resiliency plans. They’re especially crucial for preventing catastrophic wildfires, which are becoming more frequent and destructive as the climate warms.
Since its PG&E pilot with Bedford, Gridware has grown to work with nearly 30 utilities, according to Bedford, including Xcel Energy, Con Edison, and Duquesne Light Company, in Pittsburgh. In November 2025, it raised a $55 million Series B strategic growth round led by Tiger Global and Generation Investment Management, less than one year after raising $26.4 million in a Series A.
Winning the lineman over
The sensor that ultimately won Bedford over is simple: solar-powered, electromechanical, and installed in less than 10 minutes using four screws. Once they’re in place, they take a few days to calibrate and learn their environment — including the hard-to-program details like “where the trash trucks drive by” — to avoid sending false alarms. Gridscope sensors then work as “self-contained…edge computers,” monitoring pole tilt, line vibration, sound, and the electrical field around each pole to detect abnormalities.
This type of monitoring is what makes them particularly effective, according to Bedford. “Most sensors are monitoring fault current on the line and the conductors; this is monitoring the environment,” he said. “It’s kind of like having a person standing there at the pole.”
Sensors go on every other pole. Because the conductors tie each un-sensored “buddy pole,” as Bedford calls it, to its neighbors, the devices can pick up any vibration on that span — and then by comparing readings, they can pinpoint where the problem is.
“For everybody’s entire existence as a lineman, you did the same thing: The power went out, you went to the source side device, and you patrol the line,” Bedford said. “Well, now you know where to go.”
What really stood out to Bedford, however, wasn’t that the sensors could point to a fault when the power went out, but that they could detect an anomaly even when electrons kept flowing. High-impedance faults occur when vegetation or a downed wire comes into contact with something without tripping the circuit, so that the utility is oblivious to it until it eventually trips or, in the worst-case scenario, starts a fire.
Bedford remembers one incident in particular, where a PG&E line would have risked burning nearly 500 structures over 45,000 acres if the ignition point hadn’t been caught promptly by the Gridscope sensors. “That won me over,” Bedford said.
It helped that Gridware’s co-founder and CEO Tim Barat had been a lineman himself, in Australia during the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, before going to UC Berkeley to study electrical engineering. Bedford and Barat worked together on the first pilot, and were able to “really connect,” Bedford said, over that shared history.
Gridware’s pilot with PG&E expanded into 2024, and as of July 2025, when PG&E published its 2026–2028 Wildfire Mitigation Plan, the utility had installed over 10,000 devices on approximately 900 circuit miles.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story incorrectly said that Tim Bedford was running operations strategy for PG&E’s wildfire program. He was not; he was a principal program manager in operations, and was on the team developing the wildfire strategy.
