Nyquis Raises 6.3 Million Dollars to Catch Grid Faults Before They Start Wildfires and Free Up Capacity for Data Centers
Nyquis, a San Francisco startup, closed a $6.3 million seed round on November 5 to sell utilities a better look at their own power lines. Gigascale Capital and South Park Commons co-led, with Allison Pickens Ventures, Sovereign’s Capital, Pioneer Fund, Script Capital, Lost Coast Ventures and Friale joining.
The product is a box called the Nyquis Node. It installs at an existing substation in about 15 minutes, with no outage and no rewiring, and samples voltage and current thousands of times a second. The processing happens on the device, so only the findings go to the cloud. Its models were trained on more than 200,000 simulated faults.
The fault that protection relays don’t see
The target is the high-impedance fault. A branch rubbing a conductor in the wind, or a connection slowly failing, draws a small current. Too small to trip conventional protection, which is set to catch big faults. Those small faults are also how many utility wildfires start. Nyquis says it can pick up anomalies below one amp.
Its first deployment, at Otero County Electric Cooperative in New Mexico, logged more than 50 high-impedance events during one windstorm, all traced to branches hitting lines. The system narrowed them to four locations. Crews fixed three, and their signals stopped. The fourth kept alerting. That’s a clean test: fix the cause, watch the signal disappear.
The alternative most western utilities use now is the public safety power shutoff, cutting power to whole regions when wind and dry conditions line up. It works, and customers hate it. CEO Daniel Hunter put the pitch plainly: find the problem while the lights are still on.
The other use is capacity
The second product line may end up larger. Utilities plan new connections using fixed limits from old engineering studies, and those limits tend to be conservative. Nyquis wants to replace the assumption with live measurements, so a utility can see how much more load a feeder can actually take. With data centers and electrification queuing for grid connections, capacity found on existing wires is cheaper and faster than capacity built from scratch.
Nyquis monitors about 800 miles of line today. That’s small. The money goes into next-generation sensors, capacity planning tools, more machine learning and more utilities. The test for a seed-stage grid company is whether a second and third utility sign up after the pilot, because utilities buy slowly and buy from people other utilities already trust.