Tim Barat loved being an executive at an electrical company in Australia, where he grew up, even through the chaos of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. that burned over 1 million hectares and left many without power or homes. But when he moved to the US in 2013, his wife was less enthusiastic about him continuing down that path.
“My wife didn’t want me to work on high voltage anymore for safety reasons,” Barat told TechCrunch.
So he went back to school, eventually getting his master’s degree in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley.
But he just couldn’t stop thinking about power lines. Or rather, listening to them.
“As humans, we cannot feel electricity. We can feel it. We could get electrocuted,” said Barat. However, none of them are conducive to a long career. So instead, electric company linemen use their other senses to get a handle on what’s going on during an outage.
“In general, we are watching, listening. We’re feeling the transformers vibrating differently, things like that. We hit a post with a hammer and listen to the ring, then the bell, to tell if it’s empty before we climb it for safety reasons.”
This is a laborious and time-consuming process. Utility workers often have to travel dozens of miles to track down the origin of an outage, whether it’s a tree branch resting on a wire, a squirrel that got fried when it tripped a line, or a line downed by high winds. Repair work can only begin after they report the exact nature and location of the problem.
“Some companies spend nine figures a year just on these patrols,” Barat said.
There had to be a better way, Barati thought, and as he reflected on his experience as a lineman, he remembered all the times he spent listening to different parts of the infrastructure. “That’s where my mind went,” he said.
Along with Abdulrahman Bin Omar and Hall Chen, Barat founded Gridware. The company’s product is a device that literally listens for electrical problems.
“We think of the network as a giant guitar as opposed to a circuit board,” Barat said. “It’s a physical thing. We also need to monitor the physical attributes of the grid, not just voltage and current.”
Wires, poles, and transformers make different sounds depending on whether they are hit by tree limbs, hit by cars, or hit by winds. Gridware sensors, which are mounted on the pole just below the lines, are not connected to the wires themselves. Instead, they’re waiting for mechanical disturbances — sounds and vibrations — that the company’s AI and signal-processing software have been trained to identify as various risks to the network.
Processing happens on each device, and when the software identifies a potential problem, it sends the details and location to the cloud via cellular or satellite connections (or, if the signal is weak, to another device to relay the message). The entire box is about the size of an iPad and powered by solar panels, with its base angled to allow those panels to face the sun. Because they don’t touch power lines or need a separate power source, the devices are quick to install: Power lines can be left live, and each box takes less than 15 minutes to assemble and activate.
Barat said Gridware was cash flow positive last year, but he thought it was still an opportune time to raise money. Gridware recently closed a $26.4 million Series A led by Sequoia, the company told TechCrunch exclusively. Existing investors Convective Capital, Fifty Years, Lowercarbon Capital and True Capital participated. “This increase was significantly easier in that we didn’t need it,” he said.
Gridware currently monitors over 1,000 miles of power lines for 18 companies from equipment on 10,000 poles. The company has previously worked with PG&E and ConEd to ensure that utilities accurately report problems in the field.
But before Barat could get into the utility poles, he had to prove to himself that Gridware’s equipment worked.
“I built my network,” he said. “It’s full-size, 55-foot mast, 200-foot span, and I’ve spent years destroying it in every way, shape, and form. I’ve had so many people watch me blow up transformers, throw trees on power lines, cut power lines with bolt cutters — doing a lot of really dangerous activities to mimic those events.”
How did his wife feel about this? “I got into trouble,” he said, but added, “that’s behind us because we’re generally getting three to four events a day in the real world.”
