ThinkLabs AI, a specialized AI development and deployment company, has secured $39-million to scale its physics-informed artificial intelligence platform for electric utility companies.
Founded in 2024 by Waterloo Engineering alum Joshua Wong (MASc '10, electrical and computer engineering), the investment will power the company’s capabilities to help utility providers modernize power grid infrastructure for electricity-hungry AI data centres.
ThinkLabs is powering up at a critical moment as AI data centres threaten to overwhelm North America's aging power grid infrastructure. Annual power demand from U.S. data centres is projected to exceed the entire output of Texas by 2028, according to S&P Global. Wong sees the next two years as pivotal. "The next two years is enough to dictate and define the next 50 years of the grid," he said in a media article.
ThinkLabs' platform builds a "digital twin" of a power grid — a detailed simulation that stress-tests the system against extreme scenarios, from overloads to surging data centre demand. The technology compresses work that would typically take six months and hundreds of thousands of dollars into hours of computing time. "We're turning a quarter-million-dollar study that will typically take six months to perform into less than a day of analysis and just minutes to hours of GPU costs," Wong said.
The Series A funding round was led by Energy Impact Partners, with participation from Nvidia's venture fund NVentures and Edison International, one of the largest electric utilities in the United States. Returning investors included GE Vernova, which incubated and spun out ThinkLabs in early 2024 with $6.8 million in seed funding.