Vancouver-based Soma Energy has emerged from stealth with $7 million in seed and pre-seed funding as it looks to address one of the biggest constraints facing the AI economy: access to power.
The round was led by Category Ventures, with participation from Haystack, RRE Ventures, TO VC, Uncork Capital, and pre-seed investors Panache Ventures and Walter Kortschak.
Soma Energy is tackling a growing mismatch between the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure and the much slower pace of energy development. While global data centre demand is expected to increase significantly in the coming years, new generation and transmission infrastructure can take five to ten years to come online—creating a critical bottleneck.
Rather than waiting for new infrastructure, Soma is focused on unlocking capacity that already exists.
Founded by a team that previously built and operated energy systems at Amazon Web Services, the company has developed an AI-driven platform that optimizes electricity supply and demand in real time. The founding team includes CEO Ath Caramanolis, who previously scaled AWS’s renewable energy portfolio to 10 gigawatts, alongside CTO Mario Souto and Chief AI Scientist Henrique Hoeltgebaum.
“We saw and solved these problems at AWS 10 years ago,” said Caramanolis. “The answer is not simply more infrastructure, but better orchestration.”
Soma’s platform connects distributed energy resources, battery storage, and generation assets into a unified control layer, enabling both power producers and large energy users—like data centres—to operate more efficiently. By coordinating these systems, the company says it can deliver access to power in months rather than years, and at a fraction of the cost.
For data centres, this means the ability to integrate on-site generation, storage, and demand into a single system, effectively turning facilities into flexible grid assets. For power producers, Soma provides real-time intelligence on when to generate, store, or trade electricity across assets such as wind, solar, and batteries.
The company is already optimizing two gigawatts of electricity for power-producing clients and is working with five data centre customers.
With fresh capital in hand, Soma Energy plans to expand its engineering and commercial teams while accelerating deployments across North America.
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