Verse Raises $54m to Tackle the Data Centre Power Crunch

Verse, a platform that helps large energy users manage and access power, has raised US$54m in Series B funding to help launch its new product Dispatch Intelligence.

The company was founded in 2022 by Matt Penfold and Seyed Madaeni and has quickly built a reputation in the tech sector thanks to its proprietary software, Aria.

The platform is now used by several Fortune 500 companies, including Walmart, Meta and BASF, all of which are looking to make sense of their sprawling energy portfolios by tracking utility bills, contracts and power purchase agreements.

Dispatch Intelligence promises to build on those capabilities by helping companies secure power rather than simply manage it. 

Specifically, Dispatch Intelligence will be aimed at data centre operators, helping them to bring sites online faster by making better use of on-site energy resources.

The proposition has been welcomed enthusiastically by the tech sector, with the likes of NVIDIA and Google involved in this latest funding round.

Solving AI’s power bottleneck

The announcement lands at a moment when power, rather than chips or capital, has become the primary constraint on the expansion of AI.

Data centre developers around the world regions are currently grappling with generation shortages, transmission bottlenecks and lengthy interconnection processes.

This is something Verse’s founders are keenly aware of.

“Today the energy industry is facing an entirely new set of challenges,” says Matt.

“AI has driven an unprecedented surge in demand for power. Time to connect to the grid has gone from a couple of years to seven, eight, nine years,” he adds, underlining just how big this issue is getting.

Verse estimates that hundreds of data centres are currently stuck in these queues, representing what it describes as US$500bn in annual revenue left on the table industry-wide.

With Dispatch Intelligence, Verse is hoping to solve this problem.

“The race to AI is now a race to power, and developers are losing time they don't have,” explains Seyed.

“Most approaches to data centre flexibility ask you to throttle your workloads, but Dispatch Intelligence takes a different approach. 

“By orchestrating physical storage on-site, we deliver flexibility without impacting compute so systems run full-tilt while the grid sees a flexible load, letting operators skip the queue without ever slowing performance."

That last point is central to Verse’s latest pitch.

Rather than asking operators to dial down compute during periods of grid stress, Verse's model draws on batteries and other on-site technology to absorb that stress instead.

A partnership with Calibrant

To deliver this, Verse has struck a strategic partnership with Calibrant Energy, a provider of on-site energy projects including battery storage, solar and microgrids for large power users.

Calibrant is backed by Macquarie Asset Management, which manages more than US$580bn in global infrastructure assets.

Philip Martin, CEO of Calibrant, says that the endeavour is a direct response to the power access problem facing AI infrastructure.

“The main limiting factor for AI supremacy is access to power. To ensure success, data centre developers and operators need a path to deploy infrastructure quickly and at scale,” he says. 

“Together with Verse, we're enabling a new model where power can be delivered on-site, on-demand, without waiting years for grid upgrades – and without impacting electricity costs for others.”

Verse is also integrating Dispatch Intelligence with NVIDIA's DSX AI Factory reference design, a blueprint intended to speed up the construction and operation of large-scale AI data centres.

Powering the future of computing

Bessemer Venture Partners led this latest funding round, which was popular to the point of oversubscription. 

The firm’s Vice President, Lindsey Li, says that this investment speaks to the confidence in Verse’s product and its mission.

"Verse is building the kind of technology every AI infrastructure company will need in a world increasingly constrained by power. Their platform continues to evolve to meet the moment,” she explains.

“Now, with Calibrant Energy, the company is delivering a full-stack solution that helps data centre developers bring new capacity online faster and more cost-effectively."

Verse says the Series B will fund continued product development as it scales.

The company is targeting more than 100 new sites over the next 12 months, alongside an expansion of the on-site battery capacity it manages.

“This team knows how to do this. We've spent our careers building software to operate some of the world's largest batteries and energy storage systems,” says Matt.

“We've picked the people that we know can execute against this challenge and meet the moment. And we built this team here in San Francisco, the epicentre of the AI revolution.”