US energy infrastructure firm Verse has closed an oversubscribed $54 million Series B funding round to support the deployment of its new platform, which promises to significantly reduce the time-to-power for data centers.
The funding round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from GV, Nvidia, and Norrsken VC.
The proceeds of the funding will be used to launch its Dispatch Intelligence platform, which the company claims is designed to help data centers get online years faster by intelligently orchestrating on-site energy resources alongside existing grid infrastructure.
The platform was developed in partnership with energy storage firm Calibrant Energy. According to the partners, the platform will support data centers in utilizing battery systems and other technologies to reduce grid utilization during specific periods, which they claim can accelerate interconnection approvals by years, dramatically improving speed to power.
“The race to AI is now a race to power, and developers are losing time they don't have. Most approaches to data center flexibility ask you to throttle your workloads, but Dispatch Intelligence takes a different approach. By orchestrating physical storage on-site, we deliver flexibility without impacting compute, so systems run full-tilt while the grid sees a flexible load, letting operators skip the queue without ever slowing performance,” said Seyed Madaeni, CEO and co-founder of Verse.
San Francisco-based Verse has said it will integrate its platform with Nvidia’s DSX AI Factory reference design, which is designed to accelerate the construction, simulation, and operation of large-scale AI data centers. The company aims to onboard more than 100 sites over the next 12 months and expand the scale of on-site battery capacity it manages.
Calibrant Energy has already partnered with a range of data center firms. Most recently, in February, it inked a deal with data center developer Iron Mountain to deploy a 23MWh on-site battery energy storage system at the latter’s New Jersey data center. Last October, the company partnered with Aligned Data Centers to deploy a 31MW/62MWh BESS system at one of the data center company’s campuses.
Before this, in August, the company energized three front-of-the-meter BESS in New York in collaboration with CoreSite.