As Power Demand Surges and Wildfire Shutoffs Persist, Nyquis Raises $6.3M to Help Utilities Get More From Their Existing Grid

Already monitoring 800 miles of power lines, Nyquis’ proprietary machine learning technology identifies emerging grid risks and untapped capacity.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nyquis, which makes high-resolution, continuous monitoring systems for the electrical grid, today announced a $6.3 million seed round co-led by Gigascale Capital and South Park Commons, with participation from Allison Pickens Ventures, Friale, Sovereign’s Capital, Pioneer Fund, Script Capital, and Lost Coast Ventures. With wildfire risk intensifying and electrical demand surging, Nyquis helps operators spot early warning signs of potential wildfire ignitions and also uncover available capacity for new electricity demand.

The grid is running blind
The electric grid is the largest machine ever built, and demand on it is rising faster than it has in decades, driven by data centers, electrification, and new manufacturing. Yet operators have little visibility into what's happening on their own power lines, especially the local distribution lines that make up roughly 93% of the world’s grid and cause more than 90% of the outages U.S. customers experience.

Many rural cooperatives learn something is wrong only when customers call. Even large utilities piece together data from disconnected systems that often can’t report developing issues in real time. Crews patrol miles of lines, often at night and in bad weather, hoping to spot the problem before it causes an outage or a fire. During extreme fire weather, utilities can shut off power to tens of thousands of customers, sometimes for days.

Conventional protection equipment watches one number: how much current is flowing. Like a fitness tracker that reports only your heart rate, it summarizes the electricity rather than recording its full shape, and it acts only when current crosses a high threshold. But many dangerous problems, like a branch brushing a line or a deteriorating connection, draw too little current to cross it. These high-impedance faults leave lines energized and arcing, creating outage and wildfire risk, while the subtle changes in the waveform that could reveal them go unrecorded.

A clearer view of every circuit
Nyquis’ Node adds a digital monitoring layer to existing substations. It installs in about 15 minutes without a shutdown or rewiring and combines high-resolution sensing, precise time synchronization, and edge computing, so it can capture the electrical waveform continuously and analyze it on-site rather than sending raw data to the cloud. Like a high-resolution EKG for the grid, it picks up the signatures of arcing, vegetation contact, and deteriorating connections while power keeps flowing.

Nyquis’ machine learning models, developed by co-founder and CTO Steve A. Bukowski, a former principal investigator at Idaho National Laboratory, analyze voltage and current measurements captured thousands of times per second. Trained on more than 200,000 simulated faults, they detect and characterize electrical anomalies, including faults drawing less than 1 amp that are far too small to trigger conventional overcurrent protection. Nyquis helps operators identify and address electrical hazards earlier, with the goal of reducing wildfire risk and the need for broad public safety power shutoffs.

In its first deployment, with Otero County Electric Cooperative in New Mexico, Nyquis detected more than 50 high-impedance fault events from branches repeatedly contacting power lines during a windstorm, activity the co-op’s existing equipment couldn’t see. Nyquis flagged four locations. After crews addressed three, the signals there went quiet, while the fourth kept signaling, showing that Nyquis can also confirm whether a repair worked.

From fault detection to a more capable grid
Fault detection is the first application of Nyquis’ broader grid-monitoring platform. The same live data from Nyquis also helps operators plan capacity. Today, operators run lines on fixed, worst-case limits, like setting a highway speed limit for a blizzard and keeping it there all year. Nyquis complements historical engineering studies with live grid data, showing where new loads can connect and potentially reducing the time it takes to bring new projects online.

Nyquis will use the funding to develop its next-generation sensor and capacity-planning products, expand its fault-training data, and deploy systems with additional grid operators.

“The goal is to find the problem while the lights are still on,” said Daniel J. Hunter, Co-Founder and CEO of Nyquis. “When crews know where to look, they can address hazards sooner. We want to help utilities take that earlier action so fewer problems become emergencies and fewer communities face broad power shutoffs.”

“The first step to solving any problem is being able to see it,” said Mike Schroepfer, Founder of Gigascale Capital. “Nyquis gives grid operators that visibility, turning existing infrastructure into a safer, more capable grid.”

About Nyquis
Nyquis makes high-resolution, continuous monitoring systems for the power grid. Its proprietary Nyquis Node captures a detailed, real-time picture of the electricity flowing through power lines, revealing early warning signs of failure that conventional equipment misses and helping operators fix problems before they become outages or fires. The same live data shows where there’s headroom for new load. Nyquis was co-founded by CEO Daniel J. Hunter and CTO Steve A. Bukowski, PhD, PE. The company is based in San Francisco and backed by Gigascale Capital and South Park Commons. Learn more at nyquis.com.