Tip-offs
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Each week, we surface promising startups & founders through data signals.
This week, we're spotlighting AI Power →
The AI Power Crunch
The megawatt shortage is just starting.
AI's constraint is now electricity. Data center demand triples to ~580 TWh by 2028, and a new grid connection takes four-plus years. Power, not chips, now decides who scales. So a race is on to deliver megawatts sooner.
Software is compressing the wait by de-risking siting and permitting, unlocking latent grid capacity, and turning data centers into flexible grid assets, while new hardware rewires the stack, from solid-state transformers to solar-powered compute in orbit.
Looking further out, reactor builders are closing in behind them: Antares hit criticality in June, while Valar fed micro-reactor power directly to an Nvidia chip. Speed to power is the new moat.
AI Power Startups
Early-stage companies getting power to AI compute, ranked by website visit growth over the past 3 months.
Paces | 77% growth in 3 months
Software that de-risks power development - siting, permitting, and interconnection analysis for power and data center developers. Raised a $11M Series A in Jul 2024.
Brooklyn, USA
Emerald AI | 49% growth in 3 months
"Conductor" software that makes data centers flexible grid assets, unlocking faster interconnection. Raised a Seed extension in Mar 2026.
Washington DC, USA
Amperesand | 43% growth in 3 months
Solid-state transformers purpose-built for AI data centers and 800V DC "AI factory" architectures. Raised a Series A in Jun 2026.
Singapore
Starcloud | 20% growth in 3 months
Solar-powered orbital data centers for AI training - claims 90% lower electricity costs and has already trained an AI model in space. Raised a $170M Series A in Mar 2026.
Redmond, USA
GridCARE | 10% growth in 3 months
"Power acceleration" for AI data centers - AI-driven siting and utility partnerships that unlock grid capacity years faster. Raised a $64M Series A in May 2026.
Redwood City, USA
AI Power Founders
Recently funded founders attacking the power crunch from both ends, software that squeezes more out of the grid, and reactors that sidestep it entirely.
Athanasios Caramanolis
Co-founder & CEO of Soma Energy, an energy intelligence platform that gets data centers to power faster. Raised a $7M Seed in Apr 2026.
Vancouver, Canada
Ben Kellie
SpaceX launch-pad engineer; founded The Launch Company (acquired by Voyager Space). Now co-founder & CEO of Applied Atomics, building co-located nuclear power for industrial and compute loads. Raised an $8.3M Seed in Mar 2026.
Alaska, US
Tomer Timor
Co-founder & CEO of Niv-AI, whose sensors read a data center's "electrical fingerprint" to unlock stranded power. Raised a $12M Seed in Mar 2026.
Tel Aviv, Israel
Kofi Asante
Previously at Uber Freight. Now founder & CEO of Bluecore Energy, building small modular reactors on floating barges to power ports. Raised a $10M Pre-Seed in Jul 2026.
California, USA
Assil Halimi
Nuclear engineering researcher. Now founder & CEO of Apollo Atomics, a Y Combinator-backed startup making truck-sized nuclear reactors. Raised a $500K Pre-Seed in Jun 2026.
Massachusetts, US
Carried Interest
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