National Grid Partners, the venture arm of the U.K.-based utility company, invested a total of $17 million last quarter in three startups: Captura, Luminance, and Transcend.: Investing in startups that can improve mundane operational tasks is of as much interest to NGP as backing energy-related innovations.: NGP's investment is part of the company's Series A extension announced today. The Pasadena, Calif. upstart is a developer of large-scale direct ocean carbon capture technology.
"The current portfolio is taking much more of our attention right now than it would in a normal scenario," he adds. NGP has now backed 46 companies and four venture firms since its debut in 2018. It also made 15 follow-on investments just in the past year.Regarding AI, Tagare says that a lot of the promising applications have been in areas like predicting maintenance needs or helping field engineers.
What's not been convincing yet: "Some models trying to predict customer behavior, or trying to predict what's going to happen in your home and change the demand in that home by turning on appliances and turning them off."Share on linkedin