A utility pole topples over, spilling live wires into a family’s backyard. A tree branch falls on a power line and starts to burn. A wind storm scatters electric lines across a busy street. 

Today, incidents like these cause problems ranging from inconvenience to forest fires and lost lives.  And the costs of even minor outages add up, with an estimated $150 billion lost in the United States each year. But the grid of tomorrow can address these issues quickly and safely—and in many cases, avoid them altogether. 

The U.S. electric grid currently includes about 200 million electric poles. It has more than five million miles of distribution lines. It’s worth something like $1.5 trillion. And, thanks to the nearly 600,000 people who keep it running, it makes practically everything work. Already, the grid provides the power that lets us access the internet and keeps HVAC and medical devices running at home, and enables businesses to take orders and serve customers—and it’s only becoming more critical as the U.S. economy continues its shift to electric power. But what do we do when the grid goes down?

That’s the problem Gridware co-founder Tim Barat has been thinking about since he was a teenager. 

Tim started working in electric infrastructure at 15, when he dropped out of high school to become a linesman in Australia. He saw the risks of the work firsthand, losing colleagues who put their lives on the line to fix power lines. Tim went on to study electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley, where he met co-founders Hall Chen and A Bin Omar. Together, they realized that the outages, wildfires and other risks we associate with electric infrastructure are actually symptoms of a larger problem: utilities don’t have the observability they need. The grid is like a $1.5-trillion car that’s missing a “check engine” light. 

When something goes wrong—when high winds or a fallen tree knock down a power line, or a car clips a pole—most utilities can’t identify and locate the problem without time-consuming, and often dangerous, manual inspections. Crews are forced to either patrol in hazardous weather or wait until storms pass, and delays can be the difference between a non-event and a disaster.

But what if providers could instead gather that information in real-time, tracking and even predicting the health of the grid based on direct measurements from each asset? That’s Gridware: the instrumentation layer for the grid. Their sensors and analytics suite constantly monitor poles, lines, and transformers—even when the power is out—to detect issues as they happen and help utilities respond precisely and efficiently. In many cases, Gridware can even stop issues before they start, catching leaning poles and trees smoldering on energized wires. “If this had not been reported or dispatched,” a customer said about one discovery, “It would have surely caused a forest fire.”

After launching in 2020, Gridware is now working with some of the country’s largest utilities to help them monitor their infrastructure—and the results speak for themselves. In one northern California circuit, outage patrol times are down by 70%. Another midwest utility reported saving 400,000 outage minutes across four circuits, recouping the costs of deploying Gridware after a single event.

We at Sequoia are delighted to be in business with Gridware, and to support their growth by leading their Series A. The electric grid is worth protecting, and we look forward to a future of fewer outages and more reliability thanks to Tim, Hall, Omar and their team.