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.
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WALNUT CREEK, Calif., May 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ Today, Gridware announced a $5.3 million seed round investment co-led by Fifty Years and True Ventures, with participation from Y-Combinator, Liquid 2 Ventures, Wireframe Ventures, SOMA Capital, Anorak Ventures, and a fleet of outstanding funds and angels.
Gridware Co-founders (from the right): Hall Chen, Tim Barat, Abdulrahman Bin Omar.
Climate change has massively increased the likelihood and intensity of wildfires, with record-breaking reported wildfires across many U.S. states. Each of the past 4 years has brought another devastating fire season that burned homes, took lives, and left hundreds of thousands of people without power.