Piq Energy announced that it raised an oversubscribed $5 million seed financing round. The round was led by Active Impact Investments, with participation from Cisco Foundation, Mobilize AI x Energy Ventures, New Climate Ventures, Ascent Energy Ventures, Umami Capital, CLAI Ventures, and 9Zero.
Piq is building an agentic grid planning platform designed to help utilities, developers, and other organizations connect projects to the grid faster. The company said the funding will accelerate the next phase of its platform while deepening and expanding its grid intelligence layer.
The company is addressing a major bottleneck facing new energy, AI, and industrial projects: grid interconnection. Piq said the challenge is increasingly less about financing or technology and more about the slow, complex engineering process required to connect new assets to the power grid.
The announcement comes as AI, electrification, and industrial growth drive rising electricity demand across North America. More than 2,300 GW of generation and storage projects are currently waiting in U.S. interconnection queues, representing roughly twice today’s installed generating capacity.
At the same time, more than $1.5 trillion is expected to be invested in electricity infrastructure over the next five years. Piq said demand is outpacing the industry’s ability to study, approve, and connect new projects.
Every major grid decision, from large infrastructure investments to interconnection agreements, requires a series of complex engineering studies. These studies can take months or years, creating delays that slow the buildout of new power capacity.
Piq’s platform is designed to sit on top of the industry’s existing engineering software and practices rather than replacing them. The system connects models, data, and engineering workflows while enabling collaboration between engineering teams and business leaders.
The company’s agentic platform can help run grid studies simultaneously, streamlining the interconnection process and supporting faster adoption of flexible solutions and grid-enhancing technologies. Piq said this can help unlock capacity on the existing grid and move beyond “speed to power” toward accelerated interconnection.
Piq launched in 2025 after more than a year of development in stealth. The company said it has already managed more than 1,000 transmission grid models, completed more than 10,000 engineering workflows, and supported customers running dozens of analyses every day.
The company was founded by Tom Nudell, PhD, CEO, and Dionysios Stamatiadis, MSc, Chief Engineer. Piq combines power systems engineering expertise with software engineering experience from organizations including Smart Wires, UK Power Networks, EirGrid, APS, Oncor, Palantir, and C3 AI.
Piq’s long-term vision is to help the energy industry find better sites, unlock existing capacity, and accelerate power system engineering. The company is focused on helping developers, utilities, and grid operators move projects from planning to connection faster.
KEY QUOTES:
“This is an important milestone for Piq because it allows us to move faster at a time when the industry can’t afford to stall. Connecting a project to the grid shouldn’t take longer than physically building it. The next terawatt of energy infrastructure is waiting to connect to the grid, not because the physics is hard, but because the engineering can’t keep pace. I spent seven years helping utilities run studies to evaluate advanced power flow control which unlocked over 2 GW of existing capacity for new renewable energy projects. We had to run everything from production cost studies and loadflow analysis to EMT studies supporting every stage from interconnection to commissioning. Now we’re building Piq to help developers and utilities do this at scale with AI agents that they can trust. This round lets us accelerate interconnection for utilities and developers deciding what gets built this decade, which will shape the next 100 years of the power grid.”
Tom Nudell, PhD, CEO and Co-Founder of Piq Energy
“We invest in companies solving the defining infrastructure challenges of the energy transition, and Piq stood out because of the combination of technical depth, commercial traction and long-term vision. The team understands the complexity of the grid better than almost anyone we’ve met, and they’ve built a platform that has the potential to become foundational as the grid continues to evolve.”
Mike Winterfield, Founder and Managing Partner of Active Impact Investments
