From AI to EVs, the world’s demand for power is soaring, and the electrical grid is feeling the squeeze.
Enter Yottar, a startup that maps electrical grid capacity to help companies figure out where they can plug in new data centers, EV charging stations, and other power-hungry equipment.
“The electrification super cycle is colliding with the AI data center boom. That’s making the grid operators really struggle to deal with the backlog,” Peter Clutton-Brock, Yottar’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.
“Just as an example, around London, pretty much all of the capacity for things like large-scale data centers has been taken up,” he said. “It’s not a question of, is there spare capacity? It’s like, when will those upgrades be in place?”
As ancient grids grow increasingly strained, startups like Yottar have sprung up to help energy users cope with these shortcomings. Some companies, like Gridcare, focus on finding unused capacity that already exists — convincing utilities that they actually have more space available than they claim.
Yottar takes a different approach. Rather than arguing about existing capacity, the company creates detailed maps showing exactly where grid capacity exists and how much power is available at each location.
“There are a few other people playing in the space. Different people tackled slightly different use cases,” Clutton-Brock said. “The use case that we’re after is what we’ve called medium-sized demand developers, so people using electricity rather than generating it.” Generally, the projects range between 1 and 5 megawatts, he said.
Among Yottar’s customers are Tesla and the U.K.’s National Health Service. Tesla uses the startup’s SaaS offering to select sites for new Superchargers and to upgrade existing ones. The NHS uses Yottar to identify clinics and hospitals that can accommodate EV chargers, and it also uses the platform when planning solar panel and battery installations or determining where to build new radiology units.
“They can’t afford to go through each of those site by site,” Clutton-Brock said.
The startup recently raised a $1 million pre-seed round led by Haatch with participation from Cape Capital and angel investors. Yottar is also launching a new feature that will allow companies to quickly determine which locations might be capable of supporting upgrades or new equipment, the company exclusively told TechCrunch.
Yottar gets much of its data directly from the distribution networks themselves, which have been required by regulators to make this information available. The company also licenses private data that is not public, and it updates its own records using anonymized data from successful grid connections made by its customers.
At the moment, customers pay a per-seat fee and a usage charge based on the number of sites they’re evaluating. Clutton-Brock said that consultants are the company’s main competition at this point. “That’s the alternative that people have at the moment, which, especially for smaller-scale demand developers, isn’t viable.”
For now, Yottar operates in the U.K., but Clutton-Brock has his eye on expansion in the U.S. and elsewhere. “The problem is absolutely an international problem and needs an international solution,” he said.