Lucend, formerly known as Coolgradient, has raised $3.3 million in Seed funding as it expands into the U.S. market with software designed to improve data center uptime and reliability while reducing energy and water consumption. The financing was led by Remarkable Ventures Climate (RVC) and included Mitsubishi Electric Innovation Fund, New Climate Ventures, Avesta, and Stepchange, with support from existing investor 4impact capital.
The company says its platform can be deployed using existing infrastructure without requiring new hardware, turning existing sensor data into prescriptive recommendations that operators can review before implementation.
Lucend positions its product as “Transparent AI,” emphasizing explainability and a human-in-the-loop approach intended to reduce operational risk and build trust among data center teams. The platform connects to existing systems and analyzes billions of data points daily, with the company saying it can identify relationships across 300 billion sensor readings to surface verifiable efficiency and reliability improvements.
The company has been implementing its AI solution across dozens of data centers since 2023, including facilities in Melbourne, Singapore, Paris, London, Amsterdam, and Chicago. Lucend said it has worked with operators including Digital Realty, Global Switch, and T5, spanning multiple climates and data center designs and covering assets such as chillers, IACs, UPSs, and generators. Example data inputs include valve openings, fan speeds, temperature setpoints, and pressures.
Lucend reported performance outcomes across customers, including approximately a 40% reduction in power use effectiveness (PUE), about a 25% reduction in power use, about a 30% reduction in water use, and around a 40% improvement in team efficiency. The company framed the gains as increasingly important as AI-driven compute demand adds pressure to data center capacity, energy availability, and operational resiliency.
With the Seed round, Lucend said it will scale operations, sales, and customer support in the U.S., a critical market given the concentration of global data center capacity. The company also noted that Coolgradient won the Model IT category at the Yotta 2025 Innovate Arena in Las Vegas in September 2025.
Lucend said the rebrand from Coolgradient reflects its focus on daily operational clarity and verifiable optimizations, positioning the platform as a software-first pathway to measurable efficiency improvements and increased uptime without new CapEx or disruption to existing operations.
KEY QUOTES
“Lucend’s Transparent AI platform analyzes billions of data points daily and provides prescriptive recommendations that data center operators can review and choose whether or not to implement,” said Jasper de Vries, co-founder of Lucend. “Lucend’s human-in-the-loop approach removes risk by ensuring human oversight as operators develop trust in our recommendations that increases efficiency and reliability, and enables new approaches to maintenance and replacement decisions.”
Jasper de Vries, Co-Founder, Lucend
“As AI’s demand for data centers grows, data center operators need to prioritize efficiency and uptime while also conserving resources like energy and water,” said René Gompel, co-founder, “Lucend and our Transparent AI platform open a pathway to consistent, measurable efficiency improvements while increasing uptime, without new CapEx, and without disrupting existing operations, while saving some of our customers millions in annual operating cost.”
René Gompel, Co-Founder, Lucend
“Lucend has strong competitiveness in AI-driven data center optimization technologies, and we expect its solutions to significantly improve data center operational efficiency and reduce costs. By combining our hardware and infrastructure control technologies with Lucend’s AI platform, we aim to deliver greater value to our customers and strengthen our competitiveness in the data center business.”
Komi Matsubara, Executive Officer (Vice President, Business Innovation), Mitsubishi Electric Corporation
“Lucend is a category-defining company led by a world-class team. Jasper de Vries brings deep AI and product leadership and built an intuitive platform UI, with field results that outperform peers,” noted Murat Aktihanoglu, Managing Partner, Remarkable Ventures Climate (RVC). “René Gompel complements with decades of B2B software experience and prior entrepreneurial success. The team’s early insight into this market, years before the AI boom, has positioned them well ahead of competitors, many of whom are just now entering the space.”
“Energy availability is critical to the transformation of power transmission for data center operators, cloud providers, and large enterprises. Lucend offers an immediate solution to capture the massive opportunity in the U.S., and we are excited to work with the team to accelerate the company’s growth in 2026 and beyond.”
Murat Aktihanoglu, Managing Partner, Remarkable Ventures Climate (RVC)
