Abdulrahman Bin Omar, Tim Barat, and Hall Chen founded Gridware. Gridware Today's energy grids are unable to keep up with the intense demand being heaped upon…
Startups using computer technology are positioning themselves as part of the wildfire solution. It can't succeed without Indigenous technology that's existed for millennia.
As CEO of Gridware, a company recognized by Time Magazine as one of the best inventions of 2022, Tim Barat said he believes that the thing he’s most proud of is bringing his network of co-workers together.
Gridware, a Walnut Creek, Calif.-based wildfire prevention technology company, raised $5.3m in seed funding.
The round was co-led by Fifty Years and True Ventures, with participation from Y-Combinator, Liquid 2 Ventures, Wireframe Ventures, SOMA Capital, Anorak Ventures, and other funds and angels.
The company intends to use the funds to accelerate its engineering and R&D efforts and expand its utility partnership network.
Co-founded by Hall Chen, Tim Barat, and Abdulrahman Bin Omar, Gridware provides sensing technology that detects and predicts grid failures to empower utilities to prioritize upgrades and respond to incidents before they can lead to catastrophic wildfires. The company is building a system that provides millimeter visibility into the internal integrity of each and every grid component transporting electricity through high fire threat areas.
In a YC ‘power’ play, Gridware girds $5.3M to save humanity from weather
You might have thought that with more than 300 companies joining this year’s winter batch of Y Combinator, the investor interest might have thinned. Well, it’s 2021 and investors are hopping around like crazy to invest in ideas that push the boundaries in fields far-flung from enterprise SaaS.
Its approach is to use a small, sensor-laden box that can be installed to a power pole with just four screws. Gridware’s package contains microphones and other sensors to sense the ambient environment around a power pole, and it uses on-board AI/ML processing to listen for anomalies and report them to the relevant managers as appropriate.