NEWS
Announcing our $1.8M Pre-Seed to Rewire the North American Electrical Grid
Led by Contrary, with participation from Hanover and Velocity Fund.
May 14, 2025 — WATERLOO / SAN FRANCISCO
Three years ago, during a late-night discussion on a road trip to northern Quebec, I pitched Alexander a vision for transforming the electrical grid. We went deep into software defined systems, dissected the state of infrastructure, and spent hours debating how we could improve it. By morning, Voltra was born.
The Grid Challenge
The North American electrical grid faces unprecedented challenges. From Edison and Tesla's current wars, to the golden age of electrification in the '50s and '60s, all the way to our current era of SMRs and solar, our electrical system has continuously evolved. But while innovation in energy generation rapidly advances, distribution systems have remained stuck in the 20th century.
Over 70% of North American transmission lines are over 25 years old, with many exceeding their designed lifespan. Global population growth, coupled with a massive push towards electrification and data centre build outs, means electrical demand is growing at unprecedented speed, faster than ever seen before.
Grid operators are left with two options: invest billions in physical upgrades with multi-year lead times and decades-long road maps, or build smarter, intelligent systems that can substantially extend the useful life of existing infrastructure.
At Voltra, we're focused on the latter.
Our Vision
We believe to reimagine energy transmission you must reimagine the underlying control systems that power critical infrastructure. Too often this layer is relegated to Windows Vista PCs running in a dusty back office.
To meet our growing energy demands, we need systems that can process billions of transactions in real time, actively managing the flow of electricity though our transmission grid while perfectly matching supply and demand in a truly decentralized manner.
This isn't incremental improvement. It requires a fundamental transformation of our critical infrastructure.
If we don't act now, it may soon be too late. The recent outages in Portugal and Spain just begin to illustrate the cracks forming in our transmission system. We are forcing a centralized machine to behave like a distributed network, and it's starting to struggle under the strain.
A frequency deviation of 0.15Hz leading to system collapse in the Spanish and Portuguese electrical grid, largely brought on by renewable asset integration and lack of control leading to instability
At the highest level, we aim to build the intelligence layer for tomorrow's grid, revolutionizing how energy flows through society and enabling everything from advanced manufacturing to AI infrastructure.
Starting at the Edge
We've chosen electric vehicles as our entry point. EVs represent the fastest-growing load on the grid, and due to their enormous power draw, operate at the critical edge where infrastructure limitations are first felt. By 2030, EVs alone are estimated to draw nearly 5% of US electricity output, while peak loads continue growing far faster than average. If every gas station in North America suddenly moved to electric, the demand alone would make up more than half of the US summer peak load.
Charging site operators struggle with software integration, dated technology stacks, and difficult control systems as they work to build out site level microgrids and power management.
By solving EV charging challenges, we create a foundation for tackling broader grid intelligence. Starting at the edge of the grid allows us to build deep integration into physical assets, a key stepping stone on our mission to build a wider connected energy cloud.
Introducing Charge
Charge: Your real-time dashboard for EV charging management and seamless energy monitoring.
Today we're proud to announce Charge, our first collection of services, providing developers with the tools to build EV charging applications, without being an expert in the field. Charge allows for:
- Intelligent load management
- Driver-centric interfaces
- Real-time grid coordination
- Unified API interface across multi vendor hardware and systems
Our goal with Charge is to provide the go-to cloud platform for the EV space. By substantially reducing the barrier-to-entry to interface with these systems, we hope to attract many more software players and make it affordable to embed control into native experiences for drivers.
Looking Forward
We are very excited to share our partnership with Contrary, Hanover, and Velocity to accelerate our vision of a decentralized, software-defined energy grid.
Charge marks an important milestone in our mission to rebuild the software of this critical infrastructure, but it's only the beginning. With 2,600 GW of proposed generation and storage projects waiting for permission to connect to US grids (double the current installed capacity), the transformation is inevitable.
We're building the foundation for an intelligent energy system that will connect these pieces into a coherent, adaptive whole. It will be a system that can power our economy and a more resilient future.
For more information and media contact reach out to press@voltra.com
If you're interested in working with us to build the next generation of energy products, we would love to hear from you. Reach out to connect@voltra.com for information on upcoming opportunities.