Verse Raises $54m to Tackle the Data Centre Power Crunch Verse, a platform that helps large energy users manage and access power, has raised US$54m in Series B funding to help launch its new product Dispatch Intelligence. The company was founded in 2022 by Matt Penfold and Seyed Madaeni and has quickly built a reputation in the tech sector thanks to its proprietary software, Aria. The platform is now used by several Fortune 500 companies, including Walmart, Meta and BASF, all of which are looking to make sense of their sprawling energy portfolios by tracking utility bills, contracts and power purchase agreements. Dispatch Intelligence promises to build on those capabilities by helping companies secure power rather than simply manage it. Specifically, Dispatch Intelligence will be aimed at data centre operators, helping them to bring sites online faster by making better use of on-site energy resources. The proposition has been welcomed enthusiastically by the tech sector, with the likes of NVIDIA and Google involved in this latest funding round. Solving AI’s power bottleneck The announcement lands at a moment when power, rather than chips or capital, has become the primary constraint on the expansion of AI. Data centre developers around the world regions are currently grappling with generation shortages, transmission bottlenecks and lengthy interconnection processes. This is something Verse’s founders are keenly aware of. “Today the energy industry is facing an entirely new set of challenges,” says Matt. “AI has driven an unprecedented surge in demand for power. Time to connect to the grid has gone from a couple of years to seven, eight, nine years,” he adds, underlining just how big this issue is getting. Verse estimates that hundreds of data centres are currently stuck in these queues, representing what it describes as US$500bn in annual revenue left on the