- Veridue has raised a $4 million pre-seed funding round, led by Episode 1 Ventures.
- The few hours required for due diligence on renewable energy can be completed with the company’s AI platform, rather than the weeks it would otherwise take.
- HTGF, Pi Labs, and Cameron Hepburn and Jeremy Palmer, who are experts in the energy field, also took part in the investment.
Daniel Csonth worked at McKinsey for nearly 10 years, during which time he advised on energy mergers totaling over $10 billion and observed that lengthy assessments often delayed promising renewable energy projects.
In 2024, he decided to shift from advising to taking an active role in building things. He partnered with Xander van den Eelaart, who had previously created agentic AI for use in insurance underwriting at SCOR, and together they founded Veridue, a platform specialised in due diligence and mergers and acquisitions for deals in the renewable energy and data centre sectors.
The company, based in London, raised $4 million in pre-seed funding, with Episode 1 Ventures as the lead investor. High-Tech Gründerfonds, Pi Labs, and various industry angels, including Cameron Hepburn and Jeremy Palmer, also took part.
“We built Veridue as the solution we wished we had when we were the ones carrying the risk on a decision. It is not simply a chatbot pointed at a data room,” said Csonth.
According to the IEA, data centre capital spending by major technology companies exceeded $400 billion in 2025 and is expected to rise 75% in 2026. Meanwhile, over 2,500 gigawatts of renewable and data centre projects remain delayed in grid connection queues worldwide.
Buyers, lenders, and insurers all need to carry out a quick evaluation of each project, which generally lasts between four and ten weeks. Veridue says it can shorten this to just a few hours by combining large language models with its proprietary deterministic agent layer, which has been trained on actual deal results and is overseen by the company’s in-house energy specialists.
From advisors to founders
Csonth pursued studies in artificial intelligence and energy at Yale and was involved in renewable energy and data centre transactions at McKinsey across three continents. Van den Eelaart, based in Amsterdam, was in charge of agentic AI projects at SCOR focused on the underwriting and contract review of global energy assets.
Episode 1 invested in the combined experience of the two of them in dealmaking and in the use of applied AI.
“The founders have put two years into developing a focused, purpose-built solution designed around how energy infrastructure deals actually work, rather than a generic AI platform which simply couldn’t be trusted by deal teams,” said Adrian Lloyd, general partner at Episode 1, whose back catalogue includes AI infrastructure company Fluidstack and marketplace Carwow, and which says 73% of its portfolio go on to raise a Series A.
A competitive landscape for AI due diligence tools
Eunice, based in London, raised $8 million in 2026 to build audit-ready AI infrastructure that covers a wide range of alternative assets. In January 2026, the Spanish startup TetraxAI raised €1.2 million to assess clean energy risk, and in the United States, Build raised $8.5 million to apply AI throughout the infrastructure development process, including power-related infrastructure.
Veridue is taking a more targeted approach. Rather than working across a variety of asset classes, the company intends to manage the entire workflow for mergers and acquisitions in the renewable energy and data centre sectors, from initial screening through to the preparation of memos for the investment committee.
This $4 million fundraising exercise is the first institutional investment that Veridue has publicly announced. The company and its main investor state that the amount represents one of the largest pre-seed financings for European energy software, though limited data availability makes this difficult to verify. The funds are intended for Veridue to expand its platform for renewable energy developers, independent power producers, and investors.
HTGF’s Timo Bertsch notes: “The infrastructure Europe needs — renewables, data centres, grid capacity — represents one of the most critical buildouts of our generation. Capital is ready. Projects are in the pipeline. What’s been missing is the ability to move deals at the pace the moment demands.”
Episode 1 estimates that at least $15 trillion will be spent on energy infrastructure over the next fifteen years, although this figure is currently difficult to verify. The fact that there is a backlog is clear: thousands of gigawatts of projects are still awaiting funding and grid connections. It is not yet known whether AI due diligence will overcome this problem or merely speed up the paperwork while the issues relating to the grid and planning persist.
