Yottar wants to help energy users find capacity in electric grids

From AI to EVS, global demand for electricity is rising sharply, and the electric grid is feeling pressured.

Enter Yottar, a startup that maps electrical grid capacity, to help businesses know where they can plug in new data centers, EV charging stations and other power-hungry devices.

“The electrified supercycle is colliding with the AI ​​data center boom. It’s really hard for grid operators to deal with the backlog,” Yottar co-founder and CEO Peter Clutton-Brock told TechCrunch.

“For example, almost every capability of something like a large data center is being taken up in the London area,” he said. “That doesn’t matter, are there any spare capacity? That’s when those upgrades will be in place.”

As the ancient grid became increasingly tense, startups like Yottar were born to help energy users deal with these shortcomings. Some companies, like Gridcare, focus on finding unused capabilities that already exist. This is to convince the utility that there is actually more space than they claim.

Yottar takes a different approach. Rather than discussing existing capacity, the company creates detailed maps showing where grid capacity resides and how much power is available at each location.

“There are a few others playing in this space. Different people worked on slightly different use cases,” Clutton-Brock said. “The use cases we’re looking for are people who use electricity rather than generating it because we call medium-sized demand developers.” In general, projects range from 1 to 5 megawatts, he said.

Some of Yottar’s customers include Tesla and the UK’s National Health Services. Tesla uses SaaS from the startup to select a site for a new supercharger and upgrade existing sites. The NHS uses Yottar to identify clinics and hospitals that can accommodate EV chargers, and use the platform when planning solar panels and batteries installations, and determining where to build new radiation units.

“They can’t afford to go through each of these sites on a site-by-site basis,” Clutton-Brock said.

The startup recently garnered a million-dollar seed rounds led by Hart, with participation from Cape Capital and angel investors. Yottar is also launching new features that allow businesses to quickly decide where they can support upgrades or new equipment, the company tells TechCrunch exclusively.

Yottar retrieves much of the data directly from the distribution network itself, which is being requested by regulators to make this information available. The company also licenses private data that is not publicly available and updates its own records using anonymized data from successful grid connections made by customers.

At this time, customers pay per seat fee and usage fee based on the number of sites they are valuing. Clutton-Brock said the consultant was the company’s main competition at this point. “That’s an alternative that people have at the moment, especially for small demand developers.”

For now, Yottar operates in the UK, but Clutton-Brock is looking to expand in the US and elsewhere. “The problem is absolutely an international problem and we need an international solution,” he said.