What's better than a round of fresh funding? A major deal to play a big role in your industry.
That's the case for ResilientGrid. The Austin startup, co-founded in 2016 by Mike Legatt, Jeremy Adelman and Lance Ransom, provides data analysis and systems awareness software that helps utility operators make decisions about power flow.
This week, its software was selected by a huge regulatory agency - North American Electric Reliability Corporation - to help operators oversee the electric grid in North America.
Yes, utilities tech can be a bit esoteric for most of us. So let's start with where the idea was born.
When Legatt was working on his dissertation on neuropsychology in New York back in 2003, he also happened to be doing some laundry. He dropped his last quarter into the machine and then the power went out, heralding the start of what is often referred to as the Northeast Blackout of 2003.
As a ham radio operator, Legatt was part of the response effort, helping pass communications from hospitals and others who needed to communicate despite most electrical infrastructure being offline. In short, he saw the life and death consequences that play out with a massive power failure.
"The utility business has traditionally not done a great job of recognizing the importance of human beings and the role they play."
Later on, Legatt poured over a report about what went wrong and saw that it was largely a matter of human-computer interaction. That helped focus his career, and he went on to help develop an innovative situational awareness system with ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which oversees most of the Texas power grid.
In essence, he has been focusing on helping the human operators who are monitoring eight or so screens with critical information that changes by the second.
“In order to set the grid up to be successful, you have to set up their most important component – the human being – up to be successful," he said.
In 2016, Legatt left ERCOT to form ResilientGrid.
Since its founding, ResilientGrid has has raised about $1.5 million in investment with angel investors, Capital Factory and Ameren. It was the winner of last year's Capital Factory Smart Cities Challenge.
But, perhaps more important than VC dollars is ResilientGrid's new partnership and role in managing power across North America.
Electric grids are typically operated by a group of managers in control rooms. The operators each monitor different systems -- distribution, energy markets, rates, power flow and other factors. A lot of times, that's not a major problem because things are going smoothly. But it's very difficult to understand the overall complexity of the grid when problems are popping up.
"In the control room, the human being is sort of looking [from] screen to screen and ... they are taking all this information from all over the place to get a big picture view of what’s going on,” Legatt said.
That means small problems can cascade into bigger ones -- and worker safety is also often involved. ResilientGrid's software helps put all that changing data in perspective to provide a more wholistic view to help identify and address issues.
And the team believes its newest partnership will help bring more awareness to the importance of creating tools that better enable those human operators.
“I believe it’s a signal to the market," said Jeremy Adelman, co-founder and marketing and partnerships leader. "The utility business has traditionally not done a great job of recognizing the importance of human beings and the role they play."
Both Adelman and Legatt said they feel being part of the Austin tech ecosystem has been a major motivator and benefit in their growth -- and they hope to help drive innovation in energy technology.
“Being a part of that ecosystem where you have access to so much talent, creativity, brain power and experience really creates the opportunities for these information exchanges ... " he said. "That can accelerate the growth a business and provide the guardrails to grow those businesses in a collaborative way.”
