Ann Arbor's Utilidata closes $100M Series C with $40M extension

Utilidata, an Ann Arbor company building embedded AI for power infrastructure, announced it has raised an additional $40 million, closing its Series C at $100 million. The company said the extension was led by existing investor Renown Capital Partners, with participation from Keyframe Capital. Utilidata raised an initial $60.3 million in April 2025, also led by Renown Capital, with participation from Keyframe Capital, Quanta Services, and NVIDIA. 

Utilidata said the funding will go toward scaling commercialization with hyperscalers and data center operators. Its product, a power orchestration platform called Karman, was developed in partnership with NVIDIA and is built on a custom NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano module. According to the company, Karman is embedded at the rack level inside data centers to give operators real-time visibility and control over power use, with the aim of recovering capacity that would otherwise sit idle.

The company says Karman is also designed to smooth power fluctuations that can affect grid stability - a concern tied to recent guidelines from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) on managing large new loads.

"Karman squeezes every watt out of the power you already have, and makes every new megawatt you bring online work smarter," said Josh Brumberger, CEO of Utilidata.

The extension comes ahead of Utilidata's first commercial deployment, with NexGen Cloud. The company said that deployment will go live in Montreal next month and is targeting up to 50% additional usable capacity.

Investors framed their continued backing around the same constraint. “The AI infrastructure buildout is one of the defining themes of this decade, but power is a fundamental limitation, Karman directly solves that problem by getting more out of the power that is available," said James McIntyre, co-founder and managing partner at Renown Capital Partners, who described power as a fundamental limitation on AI infrastructure. John Rapaport, chief investment officer at Keyframe Capital, said AI data centers "can't afford to wait for new power capacity."

Alongside the raise, Utilidata is adding Kit Chee as chief commercial officer to lead its commercial strategy. Chee was previously at Intel, where Utilidata says he scaled cloud sales from $9 billion to $23 billion, secured hyperscaler customers at Ampere, and “helped shape growth strategy for an ASEAN neocloud.”

Utilidata has said it plans to increase its workforce by 25% this year, with many of those roles based at its Ann Arbor headquarters - a 15,000-square-foot innovation lab the company opened earlier this year with funding support from the state of Michigan.