Exclusive: Company lands money to prevent grid crises with AI's help
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IND Technology, which provides infrastructure monitoring tech for utilities to stop wildfires and outages before they start, just landed $33 million in new growth funding.
Why it matters: The firm's North American expansion is a story of this moment, thanks in part to AI.
- "IND sits at the intersection of increasing electrification and rising climate risks," Anil Tammineedi, a partner with the Angeleno Group that's a lead investor, told Axios.
- Power companies are looking to keep grids reliable and safe amid rising demand and extreme weather like heat waves — without breaking the bank.
Driving the news: Angeleno Group, a clean energy and climate tech-focused growth equity investor, and the prominent VC firm Energy Impact Partners led the round.
- Edison International and Virescent, a major climate and energy investor in Australia, also took part.
How it works: IND sells various "early fault detection" systems to prevent fires and outages by sensing transmission and other equipment — and applying AI and machine learning to vet large amounts of info.
- Think of detecting contact between tree branches and other vegetation with power lines, birds' nests on transformers, or damage to insulation equipment.
- Offerings include sensing equipment for underground cables, among others.
Catch up quick: The company was founded in 2013 in response to the massive and fatal "Black Saturday" wildfires in Victoria, Australia.
- It now has operations there, as well as the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Southeast Asia.
- CEO Alan Wong tells Axios it already works in about 10 U.S. states with customers like PG&E in California and PPL Energy in Pennsylvania.
Follow the money: Tammineedi connected IND's work to helping utilities limit power price increases.
- Reasons for higher bills are complex, but grid-maintenance costs are in the mix.
- Efficiencies like remote inspection tech and, of course, the savings from avoiding wildfires help control costs.
Threat level: Rising demand means more power traveling through existing cables, which increases temperature and makes lines sag more, Tammineedi said.
- That can lead cables to break or crack and cause power loss — and even fires when they come into contact with vegetation. All this bolsters the need for better sensing and monitoring, he said.
- "IND's technology will flag that, hey, there's a partial discharge, there's an electrical fault, so they can go and see what's happening and fix it," he said.
What's next: Wong said utilities' wildfire mitigation plans and requirements — which regulators are increasingly imposing — are a growth driver.
The bottom line: "For a long time, the money going into the grid has gone into fixing things after that break," Wong said.
- "What is changing now is that utilities and investors are realizing that it is actually cheaper to stop problems before they happen."
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