Emerald AI, a Washington, DC-based company, has raised $24.5 million in seed funding led by Radical Ventures, with participation from NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), AMPLO, CRV, and Neotribe. The company specializes in AI-driven compute orchestration software that enables AI data centers to flexibly adjust their power consumption in real time to support the electricity grid while maintaining AI workload performance.
Emerald AI’s flagship product, the Conductor platform, orchestrates AI workloads such as training, fine-tuning, and inference across a network of data centers. This dynamic management allows data centers to act as grid-responsive assets by modulating power use on demand, thereby alleviating strain on the power grid and bypassing long interconnection queues that can take 7-10 years or more.
The technology addresses a critical challenge: the soaring energy demand from AI data centers, which are projected to require 50-100 GW of additional power by 2030 in the U.S. alone. The current deficit in power grid interconnections threatens to stunt AI innovation and impact grid reliability and energy prices. Emerald AI’s software helps to unlock untapped grid capacity and bolster energy security by turning data centers from static consumers into flexible grid allies.
Emerald AI recently demonstrated its platform in a pilot project in Phoenix, Arizona, in collaboration with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, NVIDIA, and Salt River Project. The demo showed a 25% reduction in power use for three hours during a critical peak load event without compromising AI performance, proving the viability of the approach.
The company is led by CEO and founder Dr. Varun Sivaram, a former Fortune 500 energy executive and physicist. The leadership team includes experts from energy, cloud infrastructure, and high-performance computing, such as Boston University Professor Ayse Coskun and cloud veteran Shayan Sengupta.
In addition to institutional investors, Emerald AI has attracted high-profile individual backers including Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, AI pioneer Professor Fei-Fei Li, former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, and Kleiner Perkins Chairman John Doerr.
Overall, Emerald AI’s innovative software platform offers a promising solution to the energy bottleneck facing AI infrastructure by enabling data centers to dynamically balance computing demands with grid stability, accelerating AI growth while supporting a reliable and sustainable power system.