National Grid has launched a new venture capital and innovation group based in Silicon Valley, which will invest in startups bringing innovation to the energy industry.
The venture plans to invest approximately $250 million over the next two to three years. National Grid Partners envisions making 10–15 investments per year, ranging from seed capital to late-stage funding.
Lisa Lambert, a former Intel Capital executive, will lead the investment program from Silicon Valley. The National Grid Partners division will focus on innovation, incubation, investment and business development.
The company has funded investments in AutoGrid, ClimaCell, Leap, Omnidian and Sitetracker, to provide advanced and efficient energy and technology solutions. The first five investments totaled $19.5 million.
National Grid’s new investments include:
- AutoGrid leverages big data to analyze energy data and create real-time actionable information. It will help with predictive maintenance and commercial industrial demand response in the U.S.
- ClimaCell is a next-generation weather forecasting company. It will provide by-the-minute demand response for the smart grid for business optimization, as well as asset-specific outage forecasts for storm response.
- Leap offers a marketplace for distributed energy resources that enables a more effective monetization of grid services, enabling automated trading on energy markets.
- Omnidian provides comprehensive protection plans for investments in residential and commercial solar energy systems. It will optimize and control distributed energy resources (DERs), data analytics, and predictive capability, as well as providing insight into the photovoltaic (PV) market.
- Sitetracker is a SaaS platform that enables growth-focused innovators in critical infrastructure industries, such as utilities and telecom, to optimize their entire asset life cycle.
National Grid provides power and gas to millions of customers in the United Kingdom and northeast U.S. states.
