Australian startup Neara, which makes digital twins of power grids, says it’s ready to support electricity companies as they struggle to cope with the surging demand from artificial intelligence data centers after raising more than $60 million in late-stage funding.

The Sydney-based company raised around 90 million Australian dollars, or around $63 million, in a Series D round of funding announced today. It was led by Technology Crossover Ventures LLC. The round, which saw participation from existing investors Partners Group, EQT, Square Peg Capital and Skip Capital, brings Neara’s total amount raised to about A$180 million and its valuation to A$1.1 billion, making it Australia’s latest domestic unicorn.

Neara, which is officially known as LineSoft Pty Ltd., will use the funding to accelerate the rollout of its digital twin modeling technology, which combines internet of things sensors with AI to create 3D replicas of real-world power grids and their infrastructure. The software is used by energy providers to understand how their grids behave and respond to different scenarios and where improvements can be made and efficiencies gained.

The startup said power companies use its 3D models to mimic the real-world conditions faced by its infrastructure. From these simulations, it’s possible to identify underutilized capacity, respond to incidents such as storms, fires and other outages and plan how to expand their energy grids. It helps its customers save thousands of dollars that would otherwise be spent on sending human engineers to inspect hundreds of geographically distributed infrastructure assets, while enhancing safety.

Neara co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer Jack Curtis told the Wall Street Journal that the company had originally planned to raise money later in the year, or even next year, but decided to do so earlier given the enormous demands of AI data centers. As big technology companies such as Google LLC, Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. OpenAI Group PBC and Coreweave Inc. all scramble to build new “AI factories,” electricity companies are struggling to provide them with the power needed by those new facilities. Neara’s 3D models can help them to meet that demand, sometimes even without expanding their capacity.

“Power grids all over the world are reaching their limits under the combined pressure of AI, electrification and rapidly rising demand,” Curtis explained. “Across energy, transport and communications, systems built for a different era are now being pushed beyond their design assumptions. The world needs faster, more intelligent ways to understand what infrastructure is really capable of and how it behaves in the contexts that matter most.”

The company, which was founded in 2016, has already helped customers including Essential Energy, Powercor Australia, Southern California Edison and CenterPoint Energy Inc. to model more than 15 million assets globally, but it wants to do much more. It’s planning to use the new capital to hire more AI engineers and expand its international commercial operations.

TCV General Partner Muz Ashraf said today’s round is his organization’s third investment in Neara. He believes that a fundamentally new approach is needed to overcome the infrastructure challenges faced by the power industry. “Neara’s highly differentiated, physics-enabled digital twin platform is a leap forward in how utilities manage their grids,” he said.

Image: Neara