San Francisco-based Category Ventures led the firm’s seed round with participation from other U.S. investors. Montreal-headquartered Panache Ventures previously backed the company at the pre-seed stage. Soma will use the funding to help deploy its technology to more clients and add to its 18-person team. (The Logic)

Talking point: Soma’s software connects data centre operators with power producers and utilities to manage how the compute facilities draw energy from the grid. Both sides face capacity issues. Developers building new AI infrastructure must wait to connect, while utilities have more demand than they can meet. Soma claims its technology can find underutilized power across generation sites, batteries and other sources, then direct it to the right buyer. Producers get more revenue, the company says, while data centres get more of the juice they need, faster. Soma CEO Athanasios Caramanolis, a former energy trader, previously bought renewable power for Amazon Web Services. He and his co-founders then developed technology to help the cloud giant optimize those purchases.