Month: June 2026

Virtual power plant operator Voltus is acquiring energy storage startup Brightfield AI, as it looks to double down on offering speed-to-power for data centers in the wake of a “bring your own capacity” deal with Google last week.

The acquisition brings Brightfield’s tools for cutting soft costs and speeding up battery deployments directly to Voltus’ portfolio expansion efforts, at a time when hyperscalers are scrambling to secure near-term capacity anywhere they can find it.

Voltus will leverage Brightfield’s software to deploy batteries across thousands of buildings in the next few years, Voltus CEO Dana Guernsey told Latitude Media. The pair will first comb through Voltus’ existing portfolio, identifying sites that are primed to host batteries that can participate in Voltus’ BYOC program, before moving on to new customers. That strategy will prioritize PJM, where capacity constraints are particularly acute, and where VPP providers are already gearing up to participate in the forthcoming emergency backstop procurement this fall.

The goal behind the acquisition, Guernsey explained, is to increase deployment in the places, and on the timeframes demanded by the AI boom. While many hyperscalers are turning to fossil gas, there has also been a push for more renewables, and faster.

“The question [the energy sector is] getting asked is ‘how much more capacity can you build, and how quickly?’” she said. “In many ways, the only thing we can do is try to figure out how to accelerate deployment of fast, flexible, distributed capacity, which is one of the only solutions to the speed-to-power problem that we have right now.”

That’s where Brightfield comes in. “We need to create a lot more capacity on the existing electric grid to serve loads over the next three to five years,” said founder Tim Hade, who formerly founded Scale Microgrids. “That basically means we need to put batteries in as many places as we can as quickly as possible.”

Brightfield’s core product is an AI-based development tool that reduces the amount of time it takes to move from first customer conversation to a full battery proposal at a commercial or industrial site; the status quo is six to eight weeks. The software can either ingest interval data if it’s available (which Voltus already holds for many of its demand response customers) or forecast the data where not available. That allows Brightfield to generate a load profile for a facility, size a battery, and determine project costs, creating a development proposal in minutes, Hade explained.

Founded last year, the company initially targeted commercial real estate companies, using a consulting model to help them identify strong candidates for storage projects within portfolios and evaluate financing options.

Now, Brightfield’s tool will effectively become a Voltus capability, integrated into its platform and partner network. While Brightfield will continue supporting its existing customers, Hade confirmed, all new customers will be channeled through the Voltus platform.

Supercharging BYOC
Voltus launched its BYOC program for data centers last fall, as concerns about national electricity prices, particularly in the Mid-Atlantic region, ramped up. As part of that program, hyperscalers commit to financing a VPP in a region where they’re building a data center; Voltus then procures a portfolio of resources, and brings those megawatts to utilities.

Last week, Voltus announced it is procuring up to 100 megawatts of capacity in PJM over the next three years for Google — its first named BYOC customer.

The framework leverages bilateral deals between hyperscalers and capacity providers. At the behest of the White House and all 13 governors in the region, PJM will host a one-time auction this fall designed specifically to procure capacity for data centers. The unique design of that auction will facilitate bilateral agreements between new generation and hyperscale offtakers.Voltus has been instrumental in the design process for that auction, which could incentivize the use of distributed capacity in the region.

The Brightfield acquisition and Voltus’ existing BYOC strategy are “yin and yang nesting strategies,” Guernsey explained. BYOC provides a long-term fixed price signal for projects, while leveraging Brightfield’s tools are designed to bring down soft costs and accelerate timelines so that more of those projects can be built quickly.

“It makes the math [of new storage projects] bank better…and brings more megawatts online in a timeline that we need to meet the moment that we’re in,” she added.

https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/voltus-is-acquiring-energy-storage-startup-brightfield-ai/

‍

London, UK — 8 June 2026 — PhysicsX, the physics AI company for industrials, today announced an oversubscribed $300 million Series C financing at a valuation of approximately $2.4 billion. The round is led by Temasek, with participation from new investors M&G Investments and Intrepid Growth Partners, alongside existing investors including Applied Materials, Atomico, General Catalyst, July Fund, NGP, NVIDIA, Radius, and Siemens. Temasek first invested in PhysicsX in 2025, and has played an instrumental role in supporting the company’s international expansion and growth.

PhysicsX is developing and deploying its AI-native engineering platform to accelerate hardware innovation and drive engineering and manufacturing productivity in industrial organizations.

The sectors that build the world’s most critical hardware — aerospace & defense, energy, semiconductors, automotive, materials manufacturing, data centers — are under more pressure than ever to ship better products on tighter timelines. That pressure collides with a reality that every engineer knows well: the simulation workflows at the heart of hardware development are slow, expensive, and difficult to scale.

PhysicsX’s software stack is built to remove this bottleneck. Its AI models predict physical behavior in seconds rather than hours or days, enabling engineering teams to evaluate orders of magnitude more design variants and carry physics insight across the full product lifecycle: from early-stage design and manufacturing through to real-time digital twins in operation. Today, the PhysicsX platform is deployed across aerospace & defense, semiconductors, industrial machinery, automotive, energy, and materials. With model architectures and GPU economics now mature enough to support physics AI at production scale, the technology has reached an inflection point for industrial adoption — making this the moment to accelerate.

The financing comes amid rapid growth. PhysicsX has doubled year-over-year recognized revenue, tripled booked revenue, while more than doubling its customer count over the past year. The team has grown to more than 300 people, doubling in size in the last twelve months.

This round will accelerate the company’s global growth, the expansion of its platform capabilities, and frontier research, including the development of larger, more powerful pre-trained physics AI models, known as Large Physics Models.

“Almost every hard problem in the physical economy — better aircraft, better chips, better engines, better energy systems — comes down to how fast and how well engineers and machine operators can work through the underlying physics. For decades, that has been the binding constraint on hardware innovation. Physics AI removes it. We are giving engineers the ability to explore thousands of designs where they once managed a handful, in seconds rather than weeks, across the most demanding industries in the world. We are also enabling more reliable, more efficient, and altogether new ways of doing engineering, manufacturing, and production. This financing lets us put that capability in the hands of more engineers and push the frontier toward ever larger and more capable Large Physics Models,” said Jacomo Corbo, Co-Founder & CEO of PhysicsX.

“High-fidelity physics simulation has always been powerful, but it has also been slow, costly, and the preserve of a small group of specialists. Physics AI changes that in every dimension. It makes high-fidelity simulation dramatically more efficient, augments and improves on pure simulation results with ingestion of real-world data into our Large Physics Models, and opens it to applications that were never practical before. We believe in the democratization of this technology to broad technical profiles across an industrial organization — engineers, designers, and operators who previously couldn’t run these analyses themselves. As that capability spreads, its utility compounds across the business. That’s the change we’re driving,” said Robin Tuluie, Founder and Chairman of PhysicsX.

About PhysicsX

PhysicsX is the physics AI company for industrials. The company’s mission is to accelerate hardware innovation by overhauling what industrial engineering and manufacturing look like today. PhysicsX is building a new software stack to deliver deep physics AI enablement across the entire engineering lifecycle. The company partners with leading organizations in aerospace & defense, automotive, semiconductors, materials, and energy & renewables, supporting them on some of their most critical and complex challenges. PhysicsX is headquartered in the United Kingdom, with offices in London and New York, and an expanding presence in the Bay Area and Singapore.

For press inquiries, contact press@physicsx.ai