- Verse has raised $54 million in a Series B round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with NVIDIA, a leader in AI chip infrastructure, also backing the company.
- This San Francisco startup uses on-site battery storage so AI data centres can avoid interconnection queues and get online up to three years sooner, all without reducing compute performance.
- Right now, data centres that need to connect to the grid often wait five to seven years for approval. This leaves about $500 billion in yearly revenue stuck in the queue.
Every major AI company is racing to build new data centres, but most are stuck waiting for the electricity they need. At major hubs, grid interconnection queues now last five to seven years, and the wait keeps growing. Verse, based in San Francisco, believes batteries can shorten this delay by years.
Earlier this week, the company closed a $54 million Series B round to show it can be done.
Why NVIDIA wrote the cheque
The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, the firm that has backed Verse since its early days as part of its AI data centre infrastructure thesis, a space where data centres dominated built-environment venture investment in 2025, accounting for 78% of capital deployed. GV, Norrsken VC, and others also participated.
But the name that matters most to them is NVIDIA.
NVIDIA’s involvement is narrower than it might first appear, and Verse CEO Seyed Madaeni was precise about the distinction when TFN asked. “It’s best described as an integration. NVIDIA also invested in the round,” he says, rather than calling it a partnership.
Verse is plugging into NVIDIA’s DSX AI Factory reference architecture on the energy side, the blueprint NVIDIA publishes for gigascale AI data centers, so that Aria and Dispatch Intelligence work alongside DSX deployments out of the box. It’s a smaller claim than a co-branded alliance — but it still puts Verse’s software in front of every operator building to NVIDIA’s spec.
Madaeni was previously chief digital officer at Fluence, where he helped lead a $5 billion IPO and grew its renewable software portfolio to over 10 gigawatts. His co-founder, Matt Penfold, was chief commercial officer at Advanced Microgrid Solutions before Fluence acquired it. Together, they have managed grid-scale batteries, signed some of the world’s largest power purchase agreements, and built risk models used by top energy companies.
“The race to AI is now a race to power, and developers are losing time they don’t have,” Madaeni says.
The battery trick that bypasses the queue
Building a data centre can take just 12 to 18 months, but connecting it to the grid now takes five to seven years. Most current solutions ask operators to reduce computing during peak grid times, which does not work for AI workloads that require full performance.
Verse’s pitch is to avoid that trade-off entirely. Dispatch Intelligence draws down on-site batteries during constrained periods so a data center looks like a flexible, grid-friendly load rather than a fixed maximum draw, which can move a project up the utility’s queue. The infrastructure itself is owned and financed by partners.
“The battery and solar projects are typically developed, financed, and deployed by infrastructure partners like Calibrant. Verse provides the software layer that optimizes and operates those assets once they’re deployed,” Madaeni says, a split that keeps Verse’s balance sheet light while Calibrant, backed by Macquarie Asset Management, carries the capital risk.
This is part of the broader “bring your own power” trend, in which data centres generate or store their own electricity to avoid long waits in the interconnection queue.
To roll out the hardware, Verse has teamed up with Calibrant Energy, which provides on-site battery storage and microgrid solutions and is backed by Macquarie Asset Management, the world’s largest infrastructure fund manager. Calibrant owns and installs the physical assets, while Verse’s Aria platform manages them in real time and gives clients a unified view of their entire energy portfolio, including utility bills, contracts, and power purchase agreements across thousands of sites.
Competing on data
Distributed energy optimisation is not new: AutoGrid and Stem have been dispatching batteries for utilities and commercial customers for years. Madaeni’s argument is that data centers need something different.
“The bigger challenge is how to get online faster, operate flexibly, and make energy decisions with economics that operators, utilities, and finance teams can trust,” he notes.
Verse pairs real-time asset dispatch with what it calls Portfolio Insights — invoice validation, market intelligence, and contract performance tracking layered on top, so customers can see whether each energy decision actually pays off financially, not just operationally.
That combination is the bet that’s meant to separate Verse from pure optimization vendors. Whether it holds up against larger, better-capitalized incumbents as the category matures is still untested.
What comes next
Verse is targeting more than 100 sites over the next 12 months, though the rollout is mid-flight: some sites are live, others are still under construction or onboarding, and Madaeni declined to specify a typical site’s battery capacity, saying it “can vary significantly depending on the customer and use case.”
“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. 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,” says Lindsey Li, vice president at Bessemer.
A bigger question remains: as grid delays get longer and on-site power becomes standard, does the interconnection queue become irrelevant, or does the problem just shift elsewhere?
