Hammerhead AI has emerged from stealth with a $10 million seed round to accelerate the deployment of AI factories by enabling operators to maximize power utilization for AI workloads. The oversubscribed round was led by Buoyant Ventures, with participation from SE Ventures, AINA Climate AI Ventures, MCJ Collective, WovenEarth Ventures, Bombellii Ventures, Clearvision Ventures, Stepchange, Acclimate Ventures, and several prominent industry leaders, including Jack Cogen, a member of CoreWeave’s Board of Directors.
As AI factories expand to meet rising demand for model training and inference, power limitations have become an increasingly restrictive barrier. Across colocation providers and hyperscale data centers, GPUs are frequently underutilized due to insufficient power availability, leaving facilities operating far below their capabilities. Average utilization often sits between 30 and 50 percent, leaving significant power capacity unused. This gap represents stranded megawatts that could otherwise contribute to token generation and revenue.
Hammerhead AI’s Orchestrated RL Control Agents (ORCA) platform aims to unlock this dormant capacity by optimizing token processing throughput and power utilization. The platform dynamically orchestrates workloads within existing power budgets, enabling operators to deploy workloads more rapidly and improve gross margins. Each additional megawatt of stranded power that ORCA can recover may be worth between $20 million and $50 million in constrained markets.
The ORCA platform focuses on system-wide token productivity rather than power efficiency alone. Its software-driven architecture optimizes on-site power generation and storage systems, non-IT components such as chillers and cooling distribution units, IT infrastructure including racks, servers and GPUs, and, as needed, AI workloads themselves. ORCA’s reinforcement learning controllers autonomously adapt to real-time conditions across complex, data-intensive environments while adhering to power guardrails defined by operators.
The company’s leadership includes veterans of 24/7 mission-critical enterprise systems and large-scale power orchestration. CEO Rahul Kar and CTO Rajeev Singh previously built and scaled AutoGrid, where their work helped pioneer modern power orchestration technologies and culminated in the company’s acquisition by Schneider Electric. They are joined by Sadia Raveendran, who oversaw AutoGrid’s strategic partnership with Schneider Electric, along with infrastructure and cloud operations leaders from Dell, HPE, Microsoft, Meta and Lambda Labs. Hammerhead AI is also part of SE Ventures’ inaugural Accelerator Program and Nvidia’s Inception Program.
Investors cite Hammerhead’s ability to transform the economics of AI infrastructure as a key reason for backing the company. Participants in the round highlighted the platform’s potential to unlock substantial revenue, strengthen sustainability strategies and reshape how AI factories manage constrained power environments.
Hammerhead AI plans to use the newly raised capital to accelerate product development, expand global deployments, and strengthen relationships with major infrastructure OEMs and AI cloud operators. The company is inviting engagement from operators, OEMs, enterprise,s and cloud providers seeking to improve the economics and performance of AI factory infrastructure.
KEY QUOTES
“Power is the critical bottleneck in today’s AI landscape, but it doesn’t have to limit what’s possible. With ORCA, we’re enabling AI factory operators to achieve greater output from existing resources. Our investors recognize the potential for AI factories to transform their business models and move beyond grid infrastructure limits.”
Rahul Kar, CEO and Founder, Hammerhead AI
“Hammerhead enables AI infrastructure providers to unlock the full potential of their data centers. Along with unlocking new revenue, Hammerhead helps solve one of the most pressing problems in the industry: powering AI workload sustainably. Their unique go-to-market strategy, OEM integrations and AI-driven orchestration sets them apart.”
Aaron Binkley, VP of Sustainability, Digital Realty
“The Hammerhead team represents the rare combination of deep technical expertise and proven scaling experience needed to redefine the economics of AI infrastructure.”
Laura Katzman, Partner, Buoyant Ventures
“We selected Hammerhead AI from over 400 applicants to join SE Ventures’ first Accelerator Program because the team and solution immediately stood out. During our program, Hammerhead established strong alignment with Schneider Electric’s data center businesses, and there is an opportunity to launch reference designs for future AI factories. Hammerhead is the only company positioned to boost data center operators’ revenue through its unique power-aware token maximization approach. SE Ventures is proud to double down on our investment.”
Amit Chaturvedy, Global Head and Managing Partner, SE Ventures
