About Us

Company Overview
About Us

GRIDiant Corporation is the successor to Optimal Technologies which was founded by two angel investors as Optimal Technologies in 2000 with the engineering group residing in Calgary, Canada. At that time, there were only three employees … a developer and two technicians. There were two product lines in the plan: SUREFAST, for intelligent home automation hardware, and AEMPFAST, for electric grid management software. Fundamentally, it was ahead of its time at that point. The market for Automatic Meter Reading, Smart Grid and Home Automation Networks were in the concept stage and there was very little market “buzz” about products in this space. The initial version of AEMPFAST (predecessor to GRIDfast) was capable of doing simple optimization studies (1,000-3,000 bus transmission systems) and was utilized in several consulting projects with the goal of verifying the capabilities and value proposition of the product’s core algorithm.

In 2004, Optimal raised additional angel funding and it expanded the number of employees to nine full-time employees. This included Dr. Soorya Kuloor as the Chief Technology Officer plus four hardware engineers to work on SUREFAST and two software developers to work on AEMPFAST. Most of the software effort was focused on a new user interface plus the next generation core algorithm capable of handling much larger grids (100,000 buses). During this time, Optimal validated the core engine with the California Energy Commission (CEC) technical committee, finished a load serving project with Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), worked with CAISO on verification and validation of the AEMPFAST algorithm, and began work on the CEC/New Power Technologies (NPT) consulting project with Silicon Valley Power (SVP) at a value of $1.3 Million.

In late 2007, Goldman Sachs invested over $25 million in Optimal, which allowed it to relocate its engineering team to Raleigh, NC near Research Triangle Park. Research continued on the AEMPFAST product with a number or revenue pilot projects designed to further fine-tune the optimization engine. This resulted in the completion of the Real-Time Diagram (RTD) application for single line diagrams, the completion of the CEC/NPT/SCE Distributed Energy Resources project, and the winning of a pilot program with PEPCO Holdings Inc. (PHI) for fault isolation and service restoration for their “Grid of the Future” project.

In the summer of 2009, Optimal decided that the AEMPFAST product was ready to go to the market. It had reached a point that it needed commercialization and, as such, it moved from a monolithic platform to a distributed platform with flexible, configurable and auto-generated Application Programming Interfaces (API)’s. Optimal also fully separated the user interface and core engine components and changed the name of the engine to GRIDfast. Achievements to date include completion of the fault restoration project working with PEPCO Holdings Inc (PHI) to be included in their ARRA Department of Energy (DOE) stimulus funds, working with Xcel Energy to install a closed loop real-time optimization and grid care platform for control of their distribution network for Smart Grid City (as part of their DOE stimulus funding), and the beginning of the GRIDfast evaluation project with FERC that was initiated in November 2009. In September 2009, Larry Hagewood joined the company as CEO and formed GRIDiant Corporation which has taken over Optimal’s business. GRIDiant is funding the go-to-market strategy of the GRIDfast product.

Corporate Mission
Our mission is to bring real intelligence to the “Smart Grid” with a suite of software application products and services that dramatically improves the reliability, intelligence and performance of the electric distribution grid. In order to achieve our mission we will conduct our business with the following principles:

1. Obey the law
2. Take immediate care of our clients
3. Take responsible care of our employees
4. Respect our suppliers and partners

If we do these four things throughout our organization, then we will achieve our ultimate goal, which is to:
5. Reward our owners.

We call this the CEO Principle: Customers, Employees and Owners

Vision
GRIDiant will become a highly profitable, market leader in providing real-time and historical intelligence software systems and services for the electric power grid. It expects to reach $100 Million or more in revenue by the end of its fifth year in operation achieving a valuation exceeding $500 Million at that point.