Startup launched by former AWS energy team emerges with $7M to help solve data center power crunch

Soma Energy, a startup founded by former Amazon energy managers, emerged from stealth Thursday with $7 million in funding.

The Vancouver, B.C.-based company has built an AI platform serving power producers and data centers, helping both optimize their energy assets in real time to save money and extend their available power. The technology coordinates resources including wind, solar and batteries and the management of energy demands such as data center workloads.

CEO Ath Caramanolis said you can visualize an electrical system as a complex network of roads and highways on which electrons — instead of cars and trucks — are traveling.

“Our software is sort of a control plane that helps provide the self-driving for electrons on these highway systems,” Caramanolis said in a GeekWire interview.

More efficient routing of electron traffic can bring more power to bear for the grid’s competing needs.

“There is low hanging fruit everywhere, and the opportunities for large energy users like data centers to better utilize the grid exist all across North America,” Caramanolis said.

Industries, utilities and elected officials worldwide are racing to expand energy supply as data centers and electrification of transportation, heating and other sectors drive surging demand. Data centers alone are expected to more than double their power draw — from 82 gigawatts in 2025 to 219 by 2029 — with most of that growth fueled by AI, according to McKinsey.

Amazon hired Caramanolis in 2018 to create the energy optimization team at AWS, which managed about 10 gigawatts of renewable energy across its global network of data centers. Seattle City Light, by comparison, has a generation capacity of about 2 gigawatts.

Caramanolis then recruited Mario Souto, Soma Energy’s co-founder and chief technology officer, to build the machine learning platform AWS used to optimize its renewable portfolio. The startup’s third co-founder, Chief AI Scientist Henrique Hoeltgebaum, is an expert in AI-driven forecasting and anomaly detection for energy systems.

Soma Energy launched in February 2024 and has 18 employees. The startup has deployed 2 gigawatts of assets in the U.S. with customers including several independent power producers and five data center companies — among them H5 Data Centers, whose sites include a large facility in downtown Seattle.

“By coordinating existing resources, we were able to access capacity significantly sooner than expected, accelerating our time to power and removing a critical constraint on expansion,” said Josh Simms, CEO of H5 Data Centers, in a statement.

The seed round was led by Category Ventures, with participation from Haystack, Panache Ventures, RRE Ventures, TO.VC, Uncork Capital and Walter Kortschak. The investment will allow the team to hire new employees in engineering and commercial roles and expand its reach across North America.

“Having managed hyperscale power systems firsthand, the founders built Soma Energy as if they were the customer themselves,” said Villi Iltchev, partner at Category Ventures.