Soma Energy, an AI-driven energy optimization company founded by former Amazon Web Services infrastructure leaders, has emerged from stealth with $7 million in seed and pre-seed funding to address one of the most critical bottlenecks in the AI economy, access to reliable and timely power.
The funding round was led by Category Ventures, with participation from Haystack, RRE Ventures, TO VC, Uncork Capital, Panache Ventures, and Walter Kortschak.
The company is focused on unlocking existing grid capacity and accelerating “time to power” for data centers, which are facing rapidly increasing energy demands driven by AI workloads. Industry forecasts suggest U.S. data center power demand could reach 106 gigawatts by 2035, while global capacity demand is expected to grow 3.5 times between 2025 and 2030. However, traditional infrastructure buildouts can take five to ten years, creating a mismatch with the pace of AI expansion.
Soma Energy’s platform uses AI to optimize both energy supply and demand in real time, enabling data centers and power producers to better utilize existing infrastructure rather than relying solely on new generation and transmission projects. The platform integrates distributed energy resources, battery storage, and generation assets, helping reduce costs, improve efficiency, and unlock additional usable capacity.
For data centers, the platform connects on-site generation, storage, and load into a unified control system, allowing facilities to function as flexible grid assets and access power faster. For power producers, it determines optimal strategies for generating, storing, or trading energy across wind, solar, and battery systems.
The founding team brings extensive experience from Amazon Web Services, where they previously built and operated large-scale energy systems. CEO Ath Caramanolis led AWS’s renewable energy optimization program, scaling it to 10 gigawatts and negotiating more than $1 billion in energy deals. CTO Mario Souto developed machine learning systems to manage renewable assets, while Chief AI Scientist Henrique Hoeltgebaum specializes in AI-driven forecasting and anomaly detection.
Soma Energy is currently optimizing approximately two gigawatts of electricity for power-producing clients and is working with five data center customers. The newly raised capital will be used to expand engineering and commercial teams and accelerate deployments across North America.
KEY QUOTES:
“We saw and solved these problems at AWS 10 years ago, the grid constraints, the interconnection delays, the complexity of managing power at scale. We built the company because we knew there was a better way. The answer is not simply more infrastructure, but better orchestration. By applying AI to power plants and large energy loads in real time, we unlock flexibility that already exists and accelerate time to power today.”
Ath Caramanolis, CEO and Co-Founder, Soma Energy
“Soma Energy is changing what’s possible for data center growth. By coordinating existing resources, we were able to access capacity significantly sooner than expected, accelerating our time to power and removing a critical constraint on expansion.”
Josh Simms, CEO, H5 Data Centers
“Building new generation and upgrading transmission operates on timelines of five to ten years and requires hundreds of billions in capital investment. This timeline is fundamentally incompatible with the pace of AI infrastructure deployment. Having managed hyperscale power systems firsthand, the founders built Soma Energy as if they were the customer themselves, grounded in the operational realities of grid constraints, procurement friction, and market volatility.”
Villi Iltchev, Partner, Category Ventures
