Vancouver-based Soma Energy has come out of stealth with $7 million in seed and pre-seed funding, announcing a platform designed to address what the company sees as one of the AI economy's most pressing infrastructure constraints: access to power.
The problem Soma is targeting is structural. BloombergNEF projects U.S. data centre power demand could reach 106 gigawatts by 2035, while McKinsey forecasts global data centre capacity will grow 3.5 times between 2025 and 2030. For context, the US Department of Energy says that “a typical nuclear reactor produces 1 gigawatt of power per plant.”
Building the generation, transmission, and interconnection infrastructure to meet the demand that BloombergNEF and McKinsey are talking about typically takes five to ten years, according to Soma — a timeline the company argues is incompatible with the pace of AI deployment.
Rather than building new infrastructure, Soma's platform uses AI to optimize across both supply and demand in real time, connecting on-site generation, storage, and load into a single control layer. For data centres, the company says this means accessing capacity in months rather than years. For power producers, it means lower cost per megawatt-hour and reduced price volatility across wind, solar, and battery assets.
The founding team comes out of AWS's energy infrastructure operations. CEO Ath Caramanolis created AWS's renewable energy optimization program, growing the portfolio to 10 gigawatts and negotiating over $1 billion in deals. CTO Mario Souto built the machine learning platform used to manage gigawatts of solar, wind, and storage assets at AWS. Chief AI Scientist Henrique Hoeltgebaum brings expertise in AI-driven forecasting and anomaly detection for complex energy systems.
"We saw and solved these problems at AWS 10 years ago," said Caramanolis. "The answer is not simply more infrastructure, but better orchestration. By applying AI to power plants and large energy loads in real time, we unlock flexibility that already exists and accelerate time to power today."
Category Ventures partner Villi Iltchev noted that the founders' operational background informed the company's direction, saying they built Soma "as if they were the customer themselves, grounded in the operational realities of grid constraints, procurement friction, and market volatility."
Soma says it is currently optimizing two gigawatts of electricity for power-producing clients and is actively working with five data centre customers.
The seed round was led by Category Ventures, with participation from Haystack, RRE Ventures, TO VC, and Uncork Capital. Pre-seed investors Panache Ventures and Walter Kortschak also participated. The new funding will be used to expand engineering and commercial teams and accelerate deployments across North America.