Powering the AI energy revolution with Verse

Every so often, we meet entrepreneurs who articulate a vision for the future so compelling it feels inevitable. This is what it was like meeting Seyed Madaeni and Matt Penfold, co-founders of Verse. While everyone else saw a power shortage for AI demand, Seyed and Matt realized that the grid generates more than enough electricity to feed even the hungriest of AI data centers—as long as the workloads can be aligned to generation.This is why utilities today only connect new AI data centers that demonstrate the ability to generate and store power behind-the-meter (BTM).

Fortune 500 enterprises and hyperscale data centers spend billions on electricity every year, managing that spend primarily via spreadsheets and fragmented point solutions—with no system to optimize when and how they consume power. Seyed and Matt recognized the enormous opportunity to provide buyers of power the real-time AI they need to both analyze power usage and dynamically utilize batteries that liberate them from grid dependency.

This is why Verse built Aria, an AI-powered energy management platform that gives buyers of power a centralized hub to both manage total electricity spend and intelligently dispatch BTM storage assets. Through a strategic partnership with Calibrant Energy—the leading provider of on-site battery projects for large power users—Aria makes data center loads flexible without any impact on their operations or reliability. By using battery systems and other technologies to reduce grid utilization during specific periods, developers accelerate interconnection approvals by years, dramatically improving speed to power.

AI is the most power-intensive workload in computing history, a central focus in our roadmap on the AI data center stack. The demand for tokens is colliding with other macroeconomic variables, including an outdated grid and the declining cost curves of renewable resources, driving a fundamental energy revolution. We’re in an acute transitional moment: hyperscale data centers require hundreds of megawatts of continuous power at peak capacity that will take the grid years to deliver due to interconnection backlogs. BTM battery storage is one of the few near-term solutions that bypasses the grid queue entirely.

We’re excited to lead Verse’s $54 million Series B and partner with the entire Verse team for the journey ahead, as well as NVIDIA, Google Ventures, Coatue, Norrsken VC, and more.

Sometimes, that first-meeting feeling is mutual:

“We chose Bessemer because they understood Verse at the deepest level: the AI infrastructure buildout is not just a compute challenge, it is quickly becoming a power and grid challenge. Solving that requires software, intelligence, and speed—what Verse was built to deliver. Bessemer’s roots in industrial infrastructure and their long-term conviction around AI and energy made them the right partner as we build the software layer that helps companies secure power faster and orchestrate energy as a strategic advantage,” says Verse CEO Seyed Madaeni. 

Verse’s platform: Aria and Dispatch Intelligence

With Verse’s Aria platform, a Fortune 500 company with hundreds of facilities, multiple renewable Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs), and complex carbon reporting obligations, can manage the entirety of its energy financial position in one place. Aria serves enterprise energy and finance teams across utility bill management, data aggregation, planning and valuation, risk management, and portfolio insights. Verse is expanding the Aria with Dispatch Intelligence, which enables real-time decision-making by utilizing proprietary AI models that forecast the optimal times to dispatch and charge BTM batteries. It delivers meaningful cost efficiencies, reduces overall grid and system costs, and provides long-term price stability in increasingly volatile markets. Dispatch Intelligence will also be integrated with NVIDIA's DSX AI Factory reference design, accelerating the construction, simulation, and operation of gigascale AI data centers.

The team building a new standard

It would be difficult to find a team more experienced and better positioned to capture this market. Seyed is a PhD systems engineer who spent several years at Tesla building Autobidder, the automated dispatch system that controls Tesla’s large-scale battery storage assets and remains the market standard today. He then served as CEO of AMS, an AI-enabled optimization platform for utility-scale storage, which was acquired by Fluence (NASDAQ: FLNC). As Chief Digital Officer at Fluence, Seyed helped grow the software portfolio and played a central role in the company’s IPO.

His co-founder and Verse CCO, Matt Penfold, is a former Bain consultant who led all commercial relationships at AMS and Fluence across North America and Asia. Together, they’ve assembled a team with rare domain depth. Customers and industry experts alike spoke consistently about the Verse team’s credibility and their earned trust over many decades in the industry.

The current AI data center buildout represents an extraordinary and potentially time-bounded window of demand. We believe the most attractive businesses in this cycle will capture outsized growth during the capex boom and emerge on the other side as embedded operational infrastructure. Verse is exactly positioned for this opportunity—asset-light software with durable contracts tied to the physical lifecycle of each battery asset.

But Verse's ambition extends beyond the AI energy cycle. As enterprises across every industry face rising energy costs, growing regulatory complexity, and strain on the grid, the need for a centralized intelligence layer overseeing energy spend and storage will only deepen. We're proud to partner with Seyed, Matt, and the entire Verse team as they build the operating system for enterprise energy teams.