Some of the biggest, most sophisticated companies in the world have almost no real visibility into one of their largest costs: power. Contracts are complex. Prices swing. Grid capacity is scarce. Costs are rising. For some companies today, electricity can account for 30% to 40% of OpEx. For data centers, access to power determines whether a project begins operating or waits for years in a queue. Verse gives large power buyers visibility into their electricity use, so they can see what they use, what they pay, and where they can reduce costs. For data centers, Verse goes further. Its new product, Dispatch Intelligence, uses on-site batteries and software to make demand more flexible for the grid, helping projects begin operating faster without slowing down compute. This week, Josh talks with Verse co-founder and CEO Seyed Madaeni, who has spent his career at the intersection of power markets, grid software, and large-scale batteries — from PG&amp;E to Tesla to Fluence. Today, Verse announced a $54 million Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Google Ventures, NVIDIA, and others. Seyed also explains how the fastest, cheapest path to power is often the cleanest. Show Notes Guest: Seyed Madaeni, Co-founder &amp; CEO Company: Verse For more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our: * Weekly Newsletter * Climate Adoption Playbook * Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

Verse Raises $54M Series B to Help Data Centers Get Power Faster, Cheaper, Cleaner

Supercool

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Supercool

## Transcript

Welcome to Supercool, a show about climate innovation, business, and how the future is being built. I'm your host Josh Dorfman. Marc Andreessen famously said software is eating the world. Every company, whatever it made or sold, had to become a software company or get left behind. That turned out to be pretty much true. Now everyone is saying the same thing about AI. Syed Madani, co-founder and CEO of Verse, probably agrees. But he's also saying something else.

Something that has not fully landed yet in most boardrooms. If you're a Fortune 500 company, a hyperscaler, or any large enterprise where electricity is a significant piece of operating costs, and for some companies that can be 30 or 40 percent of OpEx, you also have to become a power company. Because electricity is not just a line item anymore. It's a strategic variable. The problem is that most large companies were never really built to manage it this way.

The grid is the most sophisticated non-linear system ever built by humans. And if your core business is making food, running a chemical plant, or training AI models, the odds that you have deep in-house expertise in electricity markets, grid operators, interconnection queues, utility tariffs, and real-time energy risk management are basically zero. For a long time, companies outsourced much of this work to consultants. But consultants can't give you a live view of what you're spending across hundreds of contracts and thousands of sites.

They can't tell you in real time whether you're paying the right invoice. And they can't manage a battery on a second-by-second basis. Verse builds the software that changes that. Its platform, Aria, gives hyperscalers and anyone spending north of $50 million a year on electricity a unified view of their energy portfolio. Contracts, utility bills, power purchase agreements, cost forecasts, and risk positions.

All of it in one place so companies can understand what they're using, what they're paying for, where the risk is, and what they can do about it. Increasingly, Verse is also helping those same customers get access to more power faster. And that's where data centers come in. Hundreds of data center projects are sitting in utility interconnection queues right now, waiting years for approvals, grid upgrades, transformers, transmission capacity, and generation that may not arrive for half a decade, if not more.

One estimate puts the annual revenue sitting idle in those queues at $500 billion a year. Versus new product, Dispatch Intelligence, gives data center developers a way to come online years faster, without waiting on a utility and without slowing down their operations. The fastest and cheapest path to that outcome also happens to be clean energy. You can wait years for a gas turbine, or you can start building solar and storage now.

Sayet has spent his entire career in power markets, grid software, and large-scale batteries. He starte...

Verse Raises $54M Series B to Help Data Centers Get Power Faster, Cheaper, Cleaner

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.

Verse Raises $54M Series B to Help Data Centers Get Power Faster, Cheaper, Cleaner

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.