AI-powered grid resilience startup Rhizome pushes proactive approach

Extreme weather events pose severe risks to the grid, including but not limited to power outages. Rhizome, a startup that uses AI to enable utilities to better prepare their equipment for future weather events, is encouraging customers to be proactive—rather than reactive—when it comes to climate-proofing their assets.

To further that goal, the company announced today it has secured $6.5 million in seed funding.

Rhizome’s products—gridADAPT, gridFIRM, and gridCAVA—use data on customer equipment and maintenance and historical weather data to help predict how well different equipment investments and maintenance will perform over time. The company’s products also vary in their offerings and price points: While gridADAPT (which helps prioritize resilience investing) and gridFIRM (to mitigate wildfire risk) pull from multiple data sources and can provide to-the-kilometer predictions, gridCAVA uses solely geographic information system, or GIS, data to help smaller utilities perform long-term planning.

“[We] collect as much data as possible on the utility system as well as the geographic environment,” Rhizome co-founder and CEO Mishal Thadani told Tech Brew. “We help measure, what is that resilience benefit? Or what is the risk-reducing effect of a given investment?”

In response to Rhizome’s findings, utilities might make changes to their equipment, like better insulating it from high wind or extreme temperatures, managing vegetation near their assets to avoid wildfire damage, moving lines underground, or putting rural customers more susceptible to power outages on a microgrid.

Thadani said the company plans to use the funding to invest “dramatically” in its machine learning platform, continue to expand its customer base through partnerships with utilities outside the US, and work on developing further products. Base10 led Rhizome’s seed funding round, alongside Convective Capital, El Cap, and Streetlife Ventures, among others.

“Traditionally, utilities have not been a very sexy or attractive place to invest in technology companies. But we have seen a recent rise in investors who want to invest in utilities that are tackling grid-related challenges,” Thadani said. “That’s just one thing we were really happy to see out of the fundraise.”