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Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Battery manufacturer Powin files for bankruptcy months after landing $200M loan
Battery manufacturer Powin filed for bankruptcy on Wednesday. The Oregon-based company said it has more than $300 million in debt. The Chapter 11 filing will let the company continue operating while it restructures its debt. Powin manufactured grid-scale batteries using lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) cells from China. The company had been searching for alternative domestic suppliers, but the supply chain wasn't sufficiently mature, Jeff Waters, the company's former CEO, told Bloomberg in April. The company laid off nearly 250 employees earlier this month, and just 85 remain, less than a fifth of what it started the year with. Alongside the bankruptcy filing, Waters was replaced by Brian Krane, Powin's chief projects officer. Powin was a survivor of the first clean tech boom over a decade ago. The company was taken private in 2018, and it received $135 million in growth equity in 2022 from investors, including Energy Impact Partners, GIC, and Trilantic Energy Partners. More recently, it secured a $200 million revolving credit facility from KKR. In recent years, Powin has grown alongside the boom in grid-scale battery storage, ranked third in the U.S. in terms of installed capacity and fourth worldwide. The company did not say what spurred the sudden rise in debt, though given its reliance on Chinese LFP cells, tariffs may have played a roll.
Techday NZ
12-06-2025
- Business
- Techday NZ
Swimlane secures USD $45m funding to drive AI automation growth
Swimlane has secured USD $45 million in growth funding led by Energy Impact Partners and Activate Capital, with participation from Trinity Capital. The company stated that the new investment will be used to accelerate product innovation and grow its global channel ecosystem, as Swimlane moves closer to achieving profitability in the third quarter of 2025. The firm attributes its positive outlook to sustained revenue growth, improved operating efficiency, and disciplined cost management. Financial progress Since its last funding round, Swimlane has reported growth of over 110%, expanding its client base to include more than 50 Global 1000 companies, 26 U.S. federal agencies, and five of the world's largest systems integrators. Currently, 75% of its business is conducted through channel partners, reflecting increasing engagement with managed security service providers (MSSPs), value-added distributors and resellers, and global integrators. Chief Executive Officer James Brear commented, "Swimlane is achieving what no other stand-alone AI automation security company can, providing extensible, enterprise-grade AI automation with a business model that can turn a profit. We have redefined what's possible in security operations by combining agentic AI with unmatched experience in highly scalable automation use cases that help customers solve real problems both in and outside the SOC." Focus on agentic AI Swimlane has emphasised its commitment to advancing agentic AI as part of its security operations strategy. The company's AI tool, Hero, is described as the first private, agentic AI security operations companion fully integrated into the Swimlane Turbine platform. According to the company, Swimlane's solution is capable of automating more than 25 million daily actions per customer, which it states is 17 times faster than other SOAR or security hyperautomation products. Ryan Thompson, Managing Director, Tech Lending at Trinity Capital, said: "Swimlane's agentic AI platform is redefining security automation at a time when organizations need smarter, more scalable solutions. We're proud to support the Swimlane team as they help shape the future of cybersecurity." David Lincoln, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Activate Capital, said: "Cybersecurity is drowning in complexity with too much data, too many tools and not enough integration. Swimlane cuts through the chaos with an AI automation platform that brings control to every corner of the security organization, transforming fragmentation into high-ROI outcomes. That's exactly the kind of shift the market is hungry for." Sameer Reddy, Managing Partner at Energy Impact Partners, added: "Swimlane stands out by delivering what the market desperately needs: scalable, intelligent automation that goes beyond the hype and actually works. The company's unique approach to agentic AI and hyperautomation addresses a massive gap in modern security operations and is defining the future of how organizations will protect themselves." Industry validation The company outlined a series of recent milestones that it says reinforce its market position. Among these, Swimlane is one of the first 30 companies globally to be issued the ISO42001 certification for AI. It was also ranked No. 45 on Inc.'s fifth annual Rocky Mountain list of fastest-growing private companies and named a Top 5 AI Automation for SecOps vendor by TAG Cyber. Additional recognitions include Most Valuable Pioneer in the 2025 QKS AI Maturity Matrix, and being named both a leader for technology excellence and the "Ace Performer" in the 2025 QKS Group SPARK Matrix for Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR). Swimlane reports that it plans to use part of the new funding to further its work in responsible AI innovation and expand the use of automation in security, compliance, and IT/OT operations among its enterprise and MSSP customers. Follow us on: Share on:
TechCrunch
28-05-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Atomic Canyon wants to be ChatGPT for the nuclear industry
Tech companies are betting heavily that nuclear power can help deliver the electricity they need to realize their AI plans. But data centers need power tomorrow, and the nuclear industry isn't known for its speed. Trey Lauderdale thinks AI can give nuclear the speed that it needs. Lauderdale's obsession with nuclear started close to home. In San Luis Obispo, California, where he lives, he kept running into people who worked at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant. 'They're like the coaches of our flag football team,' he said. In talking with them, he learned that nuclear power plants are swimming in documents. Diablo Canyon, near Lauderdale's home in San Luis Obispo, has around 2 billion pages worth, he said. Lauderdale, a serial healthcare entrepreneur, had a hunch that AI could help the nuclear industry tame its paper problem. Lauderdale founded Atomic Canyon a little over a year and a half ago, initially funding it with his own money. The startup uses AI to help engineers, maintenance technicians, and compliance officers find the documents they need. The startup landed a deal with Diablo Canyon in late 2024. Lauderdale said the deal led to inquiries from other nuclear power companies. 'That's when I knew, as an entrepreneur, we were at a point where we needed to raise a round of capital.' Atomic Canyon closed a $7 million seed round led by the Energy Impact Partners, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. Participating investors include Commonweal Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, Tower Research Ventures, Wischoff Ventures, and previous angel investors. Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you've built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | REGISTER NOW When Atomic Canyon first started, its AI engineers tested various models with underwhelming results. 'We quickly realized the AI hallucinates when it sees these nuclear words,' Lauderdale said. 'It hasn't seen enough examples of the acronyms.' But building a new AI model requires massive computing power. So Lauderdale talked his way into a meeting with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which conducts nuclear research and also happens to have the world's second fastest supercomputer. The lab was intrigued by the idea and awarded Atomic Canyon 20,000 GPU hours worth of compute. Atomic Canyon's models use sentence embedding, which is particularly suited to indexing documents. It tasks them with making a nuclear power plant's documents searchable using retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG. RAG uses large language models to create responses to queries, but it requires the LLMs to refer to specific documents in an effort to reduce hallucination. For now, Atomic Canyon is sticking to document search, in part because the stakes are lower. 'One of the reasons we're starting generative work around the titles of documents is because getting that wrong might cause someone a little frustration. It doesn't put anyone at risk at the plant,' Lauderdale said. Eventually, Lauderdale envisions Atomic Canyon's AI creating 'a first round draft' of documents, complete with references. 'You are always going to have a human in the loop here,' he said. Lauderdale didn't put a timeline on that effort, though. Search is 'the foundational layer,' he said. 'You have to nail the search.' Plus, given the number of documents in the nuclear industry, 'we have a long runway in search alone,' he said.
TechCrunch
09-05-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Google inks deal to develop 1.8 GW of advanced nuclear power
Google and nuclear site developer Elementl Power announced this week that they will work together on three sites for advanced nuclear reactors. The tech company has been rushing to lock up energy sources as its AI ambitions drive growing power demands at its data centers. This year alone, Google plans to spend $75 billion building data center capacity. With the new deal, Google is promising to add at least 600 megawatts of generating capacity at each of the three sites. Elementl said the reactors will be connected to the grid 'with the option for commercial off-take,' meaning that Google can buy power directly. Elementl has been operating stealthily until this announcement. The team has experience in the nuclear industry, though it hasn't developed any power plants yet. The company was started by Breakwater North and is backed by Energy Impact Partners. Elementl is taking a 'technology agnostic' approach, meaning that it hasn't decided on which small modular reactor (SMR) company it will work with to develop the projects. There are a number of possibilities, though Kairos Power is a likely frontrunner given its existing deal with Google. Kairos says its demo plant will generate 50 megawatts of electricity, with an eventual commercial plant producing 150 megawatts split between two reactors. There's no universally accepted definition, but SMRs tend to top out at 300 megawatts or so. By comparison, the most recently completed nuclear power plant in the U.S., Vogtle Unit 4 in Georgia, generates over 1.1 gigawatts of electricity, nearly four times the size of a large SMR. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you've built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you've built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | BOOK NOW Silicon Valley has been smitten by SMRs. Startups have been rushing into the space, promising to slash reactor costs through mass manufacturing enabled by SMRs' smaller size. That, coupled with the promise of 24/7 power that could be sited close to data centers, has pushed them to sign a number of deals with SMR startups, including Oklo, X-Energy, and the aforementioned Kairos. Yet no SMR has been built outside of China. One startup, NuScale, has gotten close to building one, but it suffered a setback in 2023 when its utility partner canceled its contract after the estimated cost of the project more than doubled — even as the plans were downsized in an effort to contain costs.
