Piq Energy Raises Oversubscribed $5 Million Seed Round to Help Unlock North America's Grid Bottleneck
As AI, electrification and industrial growth drive unprecedented electricity demand, Piq's agentic grid planning platform helps utilities and developers connect projects to the grid faster by automating complex engineering workflows.
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., July 08, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Piq Energy (Piq) today announced it has secured an oversubscribed $5 million seed financing led by Active Impact Investments, a venture capital firm backing some of North America's most promising technology companies, with participation from Cisco Foundation, Mobilize AI x Energy Ventures, New Climate Ventures, Ascent Energy Ventures, Umami Capital, CLAI Ventures and 9Zero.
For new energy and AI projects, the greatest barrier is not financing or technology, it’s connecting to the grid. Piq Energy is the AI layer that solves this bottleneck. This capital raise accelerates the next phase of Piq's agentic grid planning platform by bringing this technology to utilities, developers, and other organizations planning new grid connections, while deepening and generalizing its grid intelligence layer.
The announcement comes as AI, electrification and industrial growth drive unprecedented electricity demand, placing increasing pressure on utilities to process growing volumes of interconnection requests. More than 2,300 GW of generation and storage projects are currently waiting in U.S. interconnection queues—roughly twice today's installed generating capacity—while more than $1.5 trillion is expected to be invested in electricity infrastructure over the next five years. Demand continues to outpace the industry's ability to study and connect new projects.
Every decision on or about the grid–from $1B investments to interconnection agreements– requires a complex series of engineering studies, which is a process that can take months to years. Piq is pioneering an agentic grid planning platform to leverage the industry's trusted engineering software and practices, rather than replacing them. Piq's agentic grid planning platform sits on top of those tools, connecting models, data and engineering workflows while enabling seamless collaboration between engineering teams and business leaders.
Empowering agents to run these studies simultaneously streamlines the interconnection process while enabling the rapid adoption of flexible solutions and grid-enhancing technology, which can unlock capacity of the existing grid. This is more than just “speed to power,” it is accelerated interconnection.
Piq launched in 2025 following more than a year of development in stealth, and has quickly established itself as a trusted grid planning platform, managing more than 1,000 transmission grid models, completing more than 10,000 engineering workflows, and supporting customers running dozens of analyses every day.
"This is an important milestone for Piq because it allows us to move faster at a time when the industry can't afford to stall. Connecting a project to the grid shouldn't take longer than physically building it. The next terawatt of energy infrastructure is waiting to connect to the grid, not because the physics is hard, but because the engineering can't keep pace,” said Tom Nudell, PhD, CEO and co-founder of Piq Energy.
“I spent seven years helping utilities run studies to evaluate advanced power flow control which unlocked over 2 GW of existing capacity for new renewable energy projects. We had to run everything from production cost studies and loadflow analysis to EMT studies supporting every stage from interconnection to commissioning. Now we’re building Piq to help developers and utilities do this at scale with AI agents that they can trust. This round lets us accelerate interconnection for utilities and developers deciding what gets built this decade, which will shape the next 100 years of the power grid."
Founded by Tom Nudell, PhD, CEO, and Dionysios Stamatiadis, MSc, Chief Engineer, Piq combines deep expertise in power systems engineering with world-class software engineering. The company's founding team brings experience from Smart Wires, UK Power Networks, EirGrid, APS, Oncor, Palantir and C3 AI.
"We invest in companies solving the defining infrastructure challenges of the energy transition, and Piq stood out because of the combination of technical depth, commercial traction and long-term vision," said Mike Winterfield, Founder and Managing Partner, Active Impact Investments. "The team understands the complexity of the grid better than almost anyone we've met, and they've built a platform that has the potential to become foundational as the grid continues to evolve."
As electricity demand continues to accelerate, Piq’s vision is simple: find better sites, unlock existing capacity, and accelerate power system engineering, to connect assets to the grid faster.
About Piq Energy
Piq Energy is building the next generation of software to help companies connect projects to the grid faster. Its agentic grid planning platform sits on top of the industry's trusted engineering tools, connecting models, data and workflows into a single platform that enables developers, utilities, and grid operators to automate engineering studies, and evaluate more flexible and advanced transmission technologies to accelerate interconnection. Founded in 2023 and headquartered in San Francisco, Piq combines deep power systems expertise with world-class software engineering to modernize how projects move from planning to connection.
Christina Demare Piq Energy 604-617-5311 christina@somaworks.com
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