National Grid Launches New Venture Capital & Innovation Group

national gridNational Grid plc (LSE: NG; NYSE: NGG), an international electricity and gas company, has launched its venture investment and innovation arm.

National Grid Partners aims to source, fund and build companies addressing innovations in energy and information technology, from artificial intelligence, to smart assets, to enterprise SaaS, and distributed energy marketplaces.

Lisa Lambert, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer of National Grid plc, and Senior Vice President of NGP, will be leading this operation and oversee innovation, incubation, corporate venture capital, business development, and the venture fellowship program, joined by Kareem Fahmy, Dillon McDonald, Brian Ryan and Pradeep Tagare—all veterans in the technology sector.

NGP is based in Silicon Valley with offices and team members in Los Gatos, San Francisco, Boston, London, and New York.
It has already funded:
– AutoGrid, which leverages big data to analyze energy data and create real-time actionable information, aims to help with predictive maintenance and commercial industrial demand response in the US.
– ClimaCell, a weather forecasting company, which aims to provide by-the-minute demand response for the smart grid for business optimization as well as asset-specific outage forecasts for storm response.
– Leap, a marketplace for distributed energy resources that enables a more effective monetization of grid services, enabling automated trading on energy markets.
– Omnidian, a provider of comprehensive protection plans for investments in residential and commercial solar energy systems, which aims to optimize and control Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), data analytics and predictive capability as well as provide insight into the photovoltaic (PV) market.
– Sitetracker, a SaaS platform that enables growth-focused innovators in critical infrastructure industries, such as utilities and telecom, to optimize their entire asset lifecycle.

FinSMEs

09/11/2018

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