Electricity demand is growing faster in the United States than it has in decades. As of last year, the country had more generation capacity in its interconnection queue than installed nationwide — meaning if every power project seeking a connection to the grid came online, the U.S. would have enough electricity for years to come.
But wait times for those connections are only growing.
It’s a problem Chris Ariante saw coming. He got the idea for his company, Nira Energy, after seeing firsthand the challenges the backlog of projects posed during stints working at oil giant Exxon Mobil and the grid hardware startup Smart Wires. Nira’s software analyzes data from utilities to help developers shave millions of dollars off the cost of connecting to the grid by selecting the right places and times for deploying equipment. The potential applications range from generators like solar farms to load like data centers.
Now, as the Denver-based company prepares for massive expansion, Nira is taking on its first major investor, Latitude Media has learned.
On Thursday morning, Nira is set to announce a strategic investment from Energize Capital, a Chicago-based venture firm whose $2 billion portfolio includes startups with software to optimize solar developments and distributed grid resources.
“When we started this, there was no other software platform out there, and this was an unheard of concept,” Ariante told Latitude. “We really own the market at the moment.”
Unlike some rival upstarts that “might have software expertise,” he said, “we’re the first people to really take ex-transmission engineers that were literally working at the grid operators, and pair them together with folks from the likes of Palantir, Facebook and Amazon.”
Using Nira’s software, the company claims, can increase the speed of a project by 50 to 100 times. The startup occupied a unique enough niche to turn a profit in the first year after its founding in 2021, allowing Ariante and his co-founders to bootstrap the effort and avoid major investors.
The companies declined to disclose the terms of the latest deal but the financier described it as “one of the larger investments that we’ve made.”
“This was a very significant investment,” said Tyler Lancaster, a partner at Energize.
He added that it’s unusual to find a company whose top executives “were actually experiencing the problem of implementing transmission technology, then basically started building the product” and finding collaborators from the tech company. Ariante’s co-founder Andy Chenpreviously worked at the intelligence data analytics giant Palantir; Lancaster said Chen brought “really sophisticated experience in building modern software.”
“It’s rare that we see those two competencies come together,” he said. “That’s what really attracts us.”
Nira now expects to build out its software suite to broaden its reach beyond solar, storage, and data center clients to include grid planners and governments seeking data when planning new infrastructure investments.
