With participation by Prosus Ventures, the round was also supported by returning investors at Skip Capital and Square Peg Capital. The funding serves as an extension of the company’s $20 million Series B raise in 2022, bringing its funds raised to date to approximately $45 million.
With the extension of coal power plants beyond original closure dates across Australia, there is an urgent need to replace this energy with renewables while simultaneously driving down costs down for consumers.
Neara is at the intersection of this complex industry problem and helping major Network Service Providers (NSPs) including AusGrid, Essential Energy, Endeavour Energy, South Australia Power Networks and Transgrid optimise their networks across a broad spectrum of critical use cases, and in some cases, identify and access existing yet untapped network capacity to accelerate clean energy timelines.
Since Neara’s initial raise in 2021 and its Series B in 2022, Neara has seen recent local growth to diversify Australia’s approach to the clean energy transition beyond coal projects and new renewable projects.
The funding raise is testament to the rapid adoption of Neara’s technology in Australia, Europe and the U.S.
With Neara’s new System of Enablement (SoE) protocol, every energy stakeholder now has access to the same database to understand how macro factors can affect their own networks. This further enables all grid stakeholders to make better informed decisions, drive innovation and mitigate potential risks.
Investments from this latest raise will help Neara evolve its functionality and underscore its role in sourcing and accessing existing, yet untapped, network capacity for energy providers.
The platform will provide solutions for an array of decarbonisation challenges including addressing current network capacity constraints, existing infrastructure upgrade issues, hefty time and cost investments required for new infrastructure, and manual processes of connecting new generation projects to the network.
Neara’s Chief Commercial Officer Jack Curtis said, “to meet global decarbonisation goals, including in North America, Europe and Australia, the energy industry needs to significantly integrate more renewable assets. Technology plays a critical role in facilitating this transition, and this new funding will help us expand and deliver functionality to network operators, generators, regulators and customers in one unified platform, enabling them to bring renewable generation online faster and at a global scale.”
Prosus Ventures’ Head of Investments, SEA and ANZ, Sachin Bhanot said, “at Prosus Ventures, we focus on driving a positive impact on society and the planet through our investments. We are thrilled to partner Neara in fast-tracking the world to a cleaner, safer, and electrified future. We believe in the power of technology to solve the greatest challenges facing us – including action on climate change, affordable access to digital services and delivery of sustainable products and services.”
Neara is driving the clean energy transition by helping utilities future-proof infrastructure through 3D digital modelling — from severe weather like bushfires and floods, to a clean energy future. Neara’s sophisticated AI and ML platform unlocks underutilised network capacity to enable accelerated clean energy deployment.
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