Partnering with Gridware: Protect the Grid of Tomorrow

• U.S. grid: 200M poles, 5M miles of lines, $1.5T in assets.
  • Outages cost ~$150B/year; downed lines trigger wildfires.
• Gridware: real-time IoT sensors + analytics for poles, lines, transformers.
  • Detects leaning poles, smoldering branches before failure.
• Co-founders: Tim Barat (ex-linesman, UC Berkeley EE/CS), Hall Chen, A Bin Omar.
  • Barat started as a linesman in Australia at age 15.
• Core insight: “$1.5T car missing a check engine light.”
• No manual inspections needed — remote fault detection and prediction.
• Northern California circuit cut outage patrol times by 70%.
• Midwest utility recovered deployment costs from a single incident.
  • One deployment saved 400K outage minutes across four circuits.
• Sequoia led Series A.

Bryan Schreier and Charlie Curnin (Sequoia Capital) — January 8, 2025 · 2025-01-08 · Read on sequoiacap.com