ThinkLabs AI has closed a million Series A financing round to tackle the growing power grid crunch using physics-informed AI models that can simulate electrical grid behavior in real time.
The funding round was led by Energy Impact Partners (EIP), one of the largest energy transition investment firms in the world. Nvidia’s venture capital arm NVentures and Edison International, the parent company of Southern California Edison, also participated in the round.
The funding marks a significant escalation in the race to apply AI not just to software and content generation, but to the physical infrastructure that powers modern life. While most AI investment headlines have centered on large language models and generative tools, ThinkLabs is pursuing a different and arguably more consequential application.
The Problem: Legacy Grid Planning Tools Can’t Keep Up
U.S. electricity demand is projected to grow 25% by 2030, according to consultancy ICF International, driven largely by AI data centers, electrified transportation, and the broader push toward building and vehicle electrification. That surge is crashing into a grid that was engineered decades ago for a fundamentally different set of demands.
When a utility needs to understand what will happen to its grid if a large data center connects to a particular substation, engineers must run power flow simulations ??complex calculations that model how electricity moves through the network. Those studies have traditionally relied on legacy software tools and can take weeks or months to complete for a single scenario.
Physics-Informed AI: Fast and Accurate
ThinkLabs’ approach replaces that bottleneck with physics-informed AI models that learn from the same engineering simulators but can run orders of magnitude faster. According to the company, its platform can compress a month-long grid study into under three minutes and run 10 million scenarios in 10 minutes, while maintaining greater than 99.7% accuracy on grid power flow calculations.
“We’re not hallucinating the heck out of things,” said Josh Wong, ThinkLabs CEO. “We are talking about engineering calculations here. I would really compare this to a computation of fluid dynamics, or like F1 cars, or aerospace, or climate models. We do have a source of truth from existing physics-based engineering models.”
Real-World Results with Southern California Edison
In January 2026, ThinkLabs publicly announced results from a collaboration with Southern California Edison that demonstrated the real-world capabilities of its platform. The collaboration showed that ThinkLabs’ AI could train in minutes per circuit, process a full year of hourly power-flow data in under three minutes across more than 100 circuits, and produce engineering reports with bridging-solution recommendations in under 90 seconds ??work that previously required dedicated engineers an average of 30 to 35 days.
Strategic Partnerships with NVIDIA and Microsoft
The presence of NVentures in the round signals a deeper strategic relationship that extends well beyond capital. ThinkLabs works extensively within the Nvidia ecosystem, leveraging CUDA for GPU-accelerated computation and integrating Nvidia’s Earth-2 climate simulation platform.
“We are what one utility mentioned as the only high-intensity GPU workload for the OT side ??the operational technology side ??that’s planning and operations,” Wong said.
ThinkLabs also works closely with Microsoft, which hosted a webinar featuring Wong alongside representatives from Microsoft and major utilities. The SCE collaboration was built on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry.
From Toronto Hydro to Autonomous Grids
Wong has spent more than 20 years in the utility industry, starting his career at Toronto Hydro before founding Opus One Solutions in 2012 ??a smart-grid software company that he grew to over 100 employees serving customers across eight countries before selling it to GE in 2022.
After the acquisition, Wong joined GE Vernova and was asked to develop the company’s “grid of the future” roadmap. The thesis he developed ??that the grid is the central bottleneck to economic growth, electrification, and national security, and that autonomous grid orchestration powered by AI is the solution ??became the intellectual foundation for ThinkLabs.
“I was pulling together the thesis that we need to electrify, but the grid is really at the center of attention,” Wong explained. “The conclusion is we need to drive towards greater autonomy. We talk a lot about autonomous cars, but I would argue that autonomous grids is the much more pressing priority.”
Rapid Customer Adoption
ThinkLabs is working with more than 10 utilities on AI-native grid simulation for planning and operations, and the company doubled its customer accounts in the first quarter of 2026 alone.
“I have noticed sales cycles really accelerating,” Wong said. “It’s still long and depends on which utility and how big the deal is, but we have been witnessing firsthand sales cycles going from the traditional one to two years to a shortest two to three months.”
The primary use of funds will go toward advancing the product to enterprise grade and expanding the range of use cases the platform supports. The company sees a significant land-and-expand opportunity within individual utility accounts ??moving from modeling a small region to training AI models across entire states or multi-state territories.