Tim Barat loved being a lineman at an electrical company in Australia, where he grew up, even within the chaos of the Black Saturday brushfires in 2009 that torched over 1 million acres and left many without power or homes. But when he moved to the U.S. in 2013, his wife was less obsessed with him continuing down that path.
“My wife didn’t want me working on high voltage anymore for safety reasons,” Barat told TechCrunch.
So he went back to highschool, eventually getting his master’s degree in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley.
But he just couldn’t stop enthusiastic about power lines. Or slightly, listening to them.
“As humans, we are able to’t sense electricity. We will feel it. We will get electrocuted,” Barat said. Neither of those are conducive to an extended profession, though. So as an alternative, electric company linemen use their other senses to get a handle on what’s happening during an outage.
“Generally, we’re looking, we’re listening. We’re feeling transformers vibrating in a different way, things like that. We hit a pole with a hammer and hearken to the way it sounds, the ringing afterwards, to inform if it’s hole before we climb it for safety reasons.”
That’s a laborious and time-consuming process. Utility staff often need to traverse dozens of miles to trace the origin of an outage, whether or not it’s a tree branch resting on a wire, a squirrel that got fried when it grounded a line, or a line downed by high winds. Just once they report the character and exact location of the issue can the repair work begin.
“Some utilities spend nine figures per 12 months on just these patrols alone,” Barat said.
There needed to be a greater way, Barat thought, and as he reflected on his experience as a lineman, he recalled all of the times he spent listening to varied bits of infrastructure. “That is where my mind went,” he said.
Along with Abdulrahman Bin Omar and Hall Chen, Barat founded Gridware. The corporate’s product is a tool that literally listens for electrical problems.
“We predict of the grid like a large guitar versus a circuit board,” Barat said. “It’s a physical thing. We must be monitoring the physical attributes of the grid, too, not only voltage and current.”
Wires, poles, and transformers make different sounds depending on whether or not they’ve been hit by tree limbs, struck by cars, or buffeted by winds. Gridware’s sensors, that are mounted on the pole slightly below the lines, aren’t connected to the wires themselves. As an alternative they’re waiting for mechanical perturbations — sounds and vibrations — that the corporate’s AI and signal processing software have been trained to discover as different hazards to the grid.
Processing happens on each device, and when the software identifies a probable problem, it sends the main points and placement to the cloud through cellular or satellite connections (or, if the signal is weak, to a different device to relay the message). Your complete box is concerning the size of an iPad, and it’s powered by solar panels, with its base angled to permit those panels to face the sun. Because they don’t touch the facility lines or need a separate power source, the devices are quick to put in: Power lines can remain energized, and every box takes lower than quarter-hour to mount and enable.
Barat said Gridware was cash-flow positive last 12 months, but he felt it was still an opportune time to lift money. Gridware recently closed a $26.4 million Series A led by Sequoia, the corporate exclusively told TechCrunch. Existing investors Convective Capital, Fifty Years, Lowercarbon Capital, and True Ventures participated. “This raise was significantly easier in that we didn’t need it,” he said.
Gridware currently monitors over 1,000 miles of power lines for 18 firms from devices on 10,000 poles. The corporate previously worked with PG&E and ConEd to make sure the devices accurately report problems in the sphere.
But before Barat could get onto utilities’ poles, he needed to prove to himself that Gridware’s devices worked.
“I built my very own grid,” he said. “It’s full size, 55-foot poles, 200-foot spans, and I spent years destroying it in every way, shape and form. I’ve had so many individuals watch how I blow up transformers, throw trees onto power lines, cut live power lines with bolt cutters — really doing quite a lot of dangerous activities to emulate those events.”
How did his wife feel about that? “I got in trouble,” he said, but added, “that’s behind us because we’re getting generally three to 4 events a day in the true world.”
