GridCARE Raises $64 Million Series A from Leading AI and Energy Investors to Create a New Category: Power Acceleration for AI
Oversubscribed round led by Sutter Hill Ventures and John Doerr – original investors in NVIDIA, Google, and Amazon – confirms that power, not compute, is the defining constraint for AI. REDWOOD CITY, Calif., May 14, 2026–(BUSINESS WIRE)–GridCARE, the pioneer of Power Acceleration for AI, today announced the closing of its $64 million oversubscribed Series A…
Oversubscribed round led by Sutter Hill Ventures and John Doerr – original investors in NVIDIA, Google, and Amazon – confirms that power, not compute, is the defining constraint for AI.
REDWOOD CITY, Calif., May 14, 2026–(BUSINESS WIRE)–GridCARE, the pioneer of Power Acceleration for AI, today announced the closing of its $64 million oversubscribed Series A financing, representing a significant step-up in valuation from its previous round less than a year ago.
The round was led by Sutter Hill Ventures, one of Silicon Valley’s most storied firms and a defining force behind the modern compute era as an original investor in category-defining companies such as NVIDIA (accelerated computing), Snowflake (cloud data infrastructure), and Astera Labs (AI compute connectivity).
“A year ago, few people were talking about power as a bottleneck for AI – today it’s the rate-limiting step for the entire industry. GridCARE is directly addressing that bottleneck, with an unmatched team, deep domain expertise, and overwhelming customer demand,” said Vic Miller, Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures. “Power sits beneath every other layer of the AI stack, and we believe Power Acceleration will be the key technology that enables the AI economy to scale.”
The round also includes John Doerr – the legendary investor behind companies such as Amazon, Google, and Netscape – bringing unparalleled perspectives from every major wave of the internet and AI economy.
“While AI is accelerating breakthroughs in medicine, science, and climate, power remains a bottleneck,” said John Doerr, investor and author of Speed & Scale. “GridCARE delivers affordable, sustainable energy by unlocking capacity in the grid we’ve already built.”
Additional participants include utility strategics National Grid Partners and Future Energy Ventures; Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective; Stanford University; and existing investors Xora, Aina Ventures, Overture, Acclimate Ventures, and Clearvision Ventures, alongside several prominent individuals and family offices deeply involved in the AI infrastructure buildout.
The investment brings together some of the earliest investors in the AI era around a single conviction: the next critical frontier is no longer compute, but power.
The Time-to-Energize Crisis
An analysis from Stanford shows that grid utilization is approximately 30%, meaning the majority of existing power infrastructure remains unused under current operating conditions, except in rare and unlikely scenarios. Yet despite this available capacity, delivering power to new large-scale projects, such as AI factories, takes six to 10 years and costs hundreds of millions of dollars in upgrades, paid for by customers.
“This gap between when power is needed and when it can be delivered is emerging as one of the most significant constraints on growth in the AI economy,” saidAmit Narayan, co-founder and CEO of GridCARE. “We call this the Time-to-Energize Crisis. It’s leaving AI factories waiting for power when they should be driving progress, slowing critical innovation across health, education, and climate, and putting national security and competitiveness at risk.“
Introducing Power Acceleration
The new capital will establish Power Acceleration as a new category for delivering power to the AI economy, anchored by continued expansion of GridCARE Energize™, the company’s physics-based AI platform for data center energy activation and operations. GridCare Energize™ evaluates quadrillions of grid conditions in real time, modeling congestion, outages, weather, and demand variability simultaneously to identify capacity that traditional interconnection processes cannot see. The platform compresses interconnection timelines from years to months, enabling AI factories, utilities, and energy providers to bring gigawatts of new power online and operate it reliably at the speed and resilience the AI economy demands.
“The largest source of new power for the AI economy isn’t waiting to be built. It’s already in the ground, hidden in the grid we already have,”said Ram Rajagopal, co-founder and CTO of GridCARE, and a tenured Stanford professor on leave to build the company. “Our job is to make it visible and put it to work in months, not years.”
Built In Alignment With Utilities
Power Acceleration is only possible in a deep collaboration with the utilities that operate the grid. GridCARE is built to align with utilities, not work around them. Utilities face the same urgency as AI factories: meeting unprecedented load growth from data centers, electrification, and re-industrialization without compromising reliability or affordability for the customers they already serve.
“The fastest and least-expensive way to add capacity to the grid is to unlock the megawatts already hidden inside it,” saidSteve Smith, President of National Grid Partners and Group Chief Strategy Officer at National Grid. “Our work with GridCARE earlier this year supports the approach. We are deepening that commitment by joining this round as an investor and extending the collaboration into additional markets. By responsibly activating latent capacity, utilities can support economic growth, strengthen reliability, and protect affordability for the customers and communities we serve.“
In October 2025, a joint project with Portland General Electric validated the model in a top U.S. data center market – unlocking a path to over 400 MW of capacity in Hillsboro, Oregon, with the first 80 MW arriving in 2026.
GridCARE is now engaged in AI factory power acceleration projects spanning more than a dozen markets and over 2 GW of new AI compute capacity.
The Inaugural GridCARE Power Acceleration Summit
To address this growing challenge, GridCARE will host the inaugural GridCARE Power Acceleration Summit in September 2026, convening leaders from across the AI and energy ecosystems to define the new category of Power Acceleration for AI: the coordinated effort to unlock grid capacity, accelerate interconnections, and deliver AI infrastructure in the timelines required.
About GridCARE
GridCARE is the pioneer of Power Acceleration, a new system for delivering power in the AI economy. Founded at Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability, GridCARE’s Energize™ platform uses physics-based AI to identify and activate near-term capacity on today’s grid, enabling AI factories, utilities, and energy providers to unlock underutilized capacity and accelerate the delivery of large-scale AI infrastructure. To date, GridCARE has unlocked more than $10 billion in economic value for data center developers by bringing hundreds of megawatts online years ahead of schedule.
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