Utilidata raises another $40M to optimise data centre power use
What's the deal? UtilidataDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has raised $40 million from Renown Capital PartnersDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and Keyframe CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, extending a $60.3 million Series C it closed in April with backing from Nvidia. The total round now tops $100 million.
The funds will expand adoption of Karman, a compact hardware module that sits inside server racks and dynamically reallocates unused electricity across a data centre. The device measures energy consumption one million times per second and responds to changes in 20 milliseconds.
Why now? Data centre power is the bottleneck of the AI boom. Adding capacity typically means buying more electricity from a utility or building new power lines — projects that cost millions and take years. Karman offers a shortcut: get more from power that's already there.
Server racks rarely use their full allotted electricity. AI inference workloads are especially prone to fluctuations. Karman detects underuse and reroutes the surplus in near-real time, while also flagging cases where operators have set aside more reserve capacity than they need.
"Power is a fundamental limitation," said Renown co-founder James McIntyre. "Karman directly solves that problem by getting more out of the power that is available."
What could go wrong? Utilidata's claims — including a potential 50% boost in usable inference capacity at customer NextGen Cloud — are still early-stage. Convincing large data centre operators to install third-party hardware in their racks is a tough sell in a sector obsessed with reliability and uptime. Any Karman malfunction that reroutes power incorrectly could disrupt critical workloads.
The module also relies on a custom Nvidia Jetson Orion Nano chip built on the five-year-old Ampere architecture, which could limit its long-term competitiveness as newer, more efficient silicon becomes available.
The signal: Utilidata's roots are in grid-edge energy technology, not data centres — Dealroom still describes it as a company "digitizing the grid-edge to unleash the full potential of clean energy." The fact that it can now pull $100 million-plus for a data centre power product, with Nvidia participating as a corporate investor, shows how quickly AI infrastructure demand is reshaping the addressable market for energy-optimisation startups. With Renown Capital Partners and Keyframe Capital — both investment funds rather than specialist deep-tech or climate vehicles — leading the extension, the round also signals that generalist growth investors see power efficiency as a near-term commercial opportunity, not a long-horizon bet.
Read more: SiliconANGLE
