New York start-up Amperon has closed a $2m round of seed funding as it continues to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that lets electricity providers around the world view real-time operational intelligence about the state of the grid.
 
The system can provide accurate forecasts for both long-term and short-term electricity supply and consumption.
 
The growth of distributed resources, renewable intermittency and demand response programmes has forced utilities and suppliers to be more effective operationally, which requires smarter and more dynamic tools.
 
With insights from granular smart-meter demand data, Amperon believes it is well positioned to build high-value applications on top of its core product offering while simultaneously expanding geographically. Amperon is active in the Ercot, AEMO, and PJM grid regions, with plans to expand to many more global grid regions over the coming year.
 
The start-up builds real-time electricity demand intelligence tools for utilities, energy retailers, grid operators and institutional traders. It was founded by Abe Stanway and Sean Kelly in 2017. Kelly, CEO, previously traded global power markets for over 15 years at Tenaska, Lehman, EDF, E.On and others. Stanway, CTO, is a veteran data scientist and engineer, and has previously worked in data science for Etsy, McKinsey and Planet Labs.
 
The funding round was led by Blackhorn Ventures with participation from Powerhouse Ventures, Intelis Capital, Garuda Ventures, SK Ventures, V1.VC, Climate Capital, and Kevin Carter; previous investors Notation Capital and Lattice Ventures also joined the round.
 
The company had previously raised an $860,000 pre-seed round in 2018, led by Notation Capital with participation from SV Angel, Lattice Ventures, Ramez Naam, Erik Nordlander and Chris Wiggins.