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Software startup engineers a smarter grid
Brian Fuller
10/29/2012 1:16 PM EDT
PALO ALTO, Calif.--A handful of semiconductor-industry refugees on
Monday (Oct. 29) unveiled their grid-optimization startup with fresh
venture capital funding and the launch of a software product that
uses big data to improve power power use and cut costs for utilities
and customers.
Auto Grid, a year-old, 15-person company located a block from the historic former Fairchild Semiconductor building, nabbed $9 million venture funding from Foundation Capital, Voyager Capital and Stanford University. Simultaneously it launched its
The company was founded by Amit Narayan, former R&D chief at Magma Design Automation and founder of Berkeley Design Automation. He's joined on his management team by Chris Knudsen, CTO, and Andy Tang, vice president of business development, both formerly with Intel's WiMax divisiion and Pacific Gas & Electric (PGE). Former engineers in EDA and at National Semiconductor also work on the team.
Data tsunami
"Now that we have all these devices...and they're all connected and bringing data to the utilities and service providers, there are very few applications that are able to take advantage of this data," Narayan said in a press conference. "In fact most utilities and service providers are not even equipped to deal with this tsunami of data."
That data, on a 10,000-meter network can range from 32 Gbytes per years to 114.6 terabytes, depending on the how frequently the data is captured. In a network of 100,000 smart meters, it can be as much as 1.1 petabytes.
Next: To the cloud
Auto Grid, a year-old, 15-person company located a block from the historic former Fairchild Semiconductor building, nabbed $9 million venture funding from Foundation Capital, Voyager Capital and Stanford University. Simultaneously it launched its
- Energy Data Platform (EDP) software platform for mining smart meter and other utility data and its
- Its Demand Response Optimization and Management Systems (DROMS), a software-as-a-service platform aimed at easing the costs to utilities of implementing demand response programs while increasing the “yield” of these programs.
The company was founded by Amit Narayan, former R&D chief at Magma Design Automation and founder of Berkeley Design Automation. He's joined on his management team by Chris Knudsen, CTO, and Andy Tang, vice president of business development, both formerly with Intel's WiMax divisiion and Pacific Gas & Electric (PGE). Former engineers in EDA and at National Semiconductor also work on the team.
Data tsunami
"Now that we have all these devices...and they're all connected and bringing data to the utilities and service providers, there are very few applications that are able to take advantage of this data," Narayan said in a press conference. "In fact most utilities and service providers are not even equipped to deal with this tsunami of data."
That data, on a 10,000-meter network can range from 32 Gbytes per years to 114.6 terabytes, depending on the how frequently the data is captured. In a network of 100,000 smart meters, it can be as much as 1.1 petabytes.
Next: To the cloud
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