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Welcome to the smart meter’s second act

Karman anticipates and solves real-time challenges at the edge of the electric grid

, an AI-powered technology company, announced today the formal branding of its distributed AI platform, now known as Karman.

“For the past decade, Utilidata has advanced real-time software solutions to make the electric grid cleaner, more efficient, and more resilient,” said Theresa Gilbert, Chief Experience Officer at Utilidata. “We’re in a period of growth and evolution, making significant strides to bring distributed AI to the grid edge to support utilities and customers in their energy transition. Unveiling Karman reflects the dawn of a new era for both Utilidata and the grid.”

Karman utilizes NVIDIA’s accelerated computing to bring 100 times the processing power of other meter-based solutions to the edge of the grid, making it possible to capture high-resolution data and identify patterns in large volumes of data.

The distributed AI platform connects millions of endpoints — from meters to EV chargers and solar panels — and coordinates them to monitor and react to real-time conditions. By providing access to better quality data in real-time, Karman provides utilities with a last mile view of their system and serves as a foundation to operating the grid.

Today, distribution grid operators commonly forecast and monitor energy loads manually with minimal automation due to a lack of computing power at the grid edge for real-time decision-making. With Karman, utilities will have the ability to command grid assets in real-time and make split second decisions based on changing grid conditions.

The Karman platform provides real-time system visibility, electric vehicle integration, solar integration, demand flexibility and system resiliency. Specifically designed for grid operations with an open, software-defined architecture, Karman will become smarter and more valuable over time as new AI models are developed and more applications are added.

Utilidata is an AI-powered technology company providing utilities with robust, real-time insights to operate a connected grid and better serve their customers. The company’s distributed AI platform, Karman, is powered by the NVIDIA Jetson platform, and provides unparalleled processing power at the grid edge to accelerate decarbonization and better serve people. For more information, visit 

Utilidata Formally Brands its Distributed AI Platform Karman 

, an industry leading grid-edge technology company, today announced a research partnership with the 

University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI)

 to study the relationship between electric vehicle (EV) driving and charging behaviors to better understand how those behaviors impact the electric grid. Utilizing Utilidata’s smart grid chips, a first-of-its-kind distributed artificial intelligence (AI) platform, researchers have installed the technology on several EV charging stations across University of Michigan’s (U-M) campus to collect data on the impact on the grid.

Utilidata’s smart grid chips are collecting real-time voltage, current, and power data at the edge of the grid, allowing researchers to analyze and detect EV charging patterns at each location. This data will be analyzed alongside vehicle data from a group of participants within the research study who have a vehicle monitoring device installed on their EV. Data from the monitoring device includes start and stop time for charging, location of charging, trips taken, and acceleration/deceleration. Closely analyzing driving and charging behavior will lead to a better understanding of how to manage EV demand on the grid and help utilities develop customer smart charging programs. As UMTRI researchers continue to collect and analyze data, they’ll have access to the recently announced 

 for further collaboration. Results from the UMTRI study are anticipated later this year.

“As more people invest in electric vehicles, our electric grid needs to be ready to support the influx in energy demand. We’re thrilled to have partners like UMTRI whose research and studies have made major, lasting impacts on the transportation industry,” said Josh Brumberger, Utilidata’s Chief Executive Officer. “Access to real-time insights of when EVs are charging will help utilities identify charging locations and design better EV programs for customers.”

The study with UMTRI follows the recent 

news on Utilidata’s new innovation lab and its commercial manufacturing partnership

“As we transition to electric transportation, the industry needs cutting edge technologies, like Utilidata’s smart grid chip, to meet the moment and bring us into the future”, said Jim Sayer, UMTRI director. “Partnering with Utilidata allows us to combine their energy and grid expertise with our decades of experience in conducting large scale research projects, data collection, and deployments that lead to a safer, more efficient, and equitable transportation and mobility future.”

EVs are projected to make up almost 50 percent of all car sales by 2030, and Michigan’s goal is to build the infrastructure necessary to support 2 million EVs on its roads by that time. As the transition to cleaner technologies continues, specifically in the automotive space, understanding the potential impact of these new technologies on the grid will be crucial. Utilidata’s smart grid chip, powered by the NVIDIA Jetson platform, is a new distributed AI platform installed alongside electric meters to integrate more distributed energy resources (DERs) including solar, battery storage, and EVs and enhance resiliency of the electric grid. Leveraging NVIDIA’s accelerated computing and AI technology, the smart grid chip collects and analyzes large amounts of data at the edge of the grid to provide utilities with real-time visibility of grid conditions.


Utilidata is a technology company bringing distributed artificial intelligence (AI) to the edge of the electric grid to accelerate decarbonization and better serve utility customers. The company’s smart grid chip, powered by NVIDIA, is the utility industry’s first scalable distributed AI solution, and provides an open, scalable and future-proof platform for grid operations. For more information, visit 

Utilidata Partners With The University Of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) On Electric Vehicle Charging Behavior Study

(ANN ARBOR, MI – April 27, 2023) – Utilidata, an industry leading grid-edge technology company, announced today a manufacturing partnership with Michigan-based Brooks Utility Products, a manufacturer of electric metering related products for over 150 years, to establish domestic manufacturing for its NVIDIA-powered smart grid chips in the heartland of the United States. Utilidata is also opening its innovation lab where research and development for its smart grid chips will take place.

, will bring the product to full commercialization in 2023 with assembly, testing, and use of their meter socket adapter. Commercial-scale production will begin this spring to meet utility customer demand. Current utility customers utilizing Utilidata’s smart grid chips include Portland General Electric and Lake Placid Municipal Power.

“Brooks is excited to work with Utilidata to bring new technology and innovation to the electric utility market,” said Robert Kiessling, Brooks Utility Products national marketing manager. “The grid needs technologies like the smart grid chip to become cleaner, more resilient, and decentralized. Coupling Utilidata’s innovative platform and smart chip technology with Brooks’ focus on safe and reliable products provides the optimal solution for a dynamically changing electrical grid.”

Utilidata’s innovation lab is located in the Northern Brewery building in Ann Arbor, and serves as the company’s center of excellence for rapid prototyping and design. The facility is intended to build upon the company’s work with Ann Arbor-based Endectra, a University of Michigan spinout that prototyped the first several generations of the smart grid chip product. Utilidata will harness the talent from the University of Michigan and other local institutions as it begins to recruit for several immediate high-tech engineering jobs at its lab in Ann Arbor.

“One of the biggest challenges electric utilities face is managing the rapid adoption of electric transportation, so there is no better place to be innovating than in Michigan at the intersection of the electric transportation, manufacturing, and clean energy industries,” said Josh Brumberger, Utilidata CEO. “The State of Michigan’s recent investments in technology innovation and workforce development combined with the research and talent of the University of Michigan and other local institutions made Ann Arbor a clear choice.”

Utilidata’s smart grid chip is a distributed artificial intelligence (AI) platform that enhances resiliency of the electric grid, integrates distributed energy resources (DERs) — including solar, storage, and electric vehicles (EVs) — and accelerates the transition to a decarbonized grid. 

, which is powered by NVIDIA’s accelerated computing and AI technology, collects and analyzes large amounts of granular data at the edge of the grid to provide utility distribution companies with enhanced visibility to seamlessly integrate more clean energy while also reducing power outages and enabling quicker storm recovery.


Utilidata is a technology company bringing distributed artificial intelligence (AI) to the edge of the electric grid to accelerate decarbonization and better serve utility customers. The company’s smart grid chip, powered by NVIDIA, is the utility industry’s first scalable distributed AI solution, and provides an open, scalable and future-proof platform for grid operations. For more information, visit utilidata.com or follow 


Brooks Utility Products innovates, manufactures and supplies complete lines of metering related products for the utility industry. For more information about Brooks Utility Products visit 

Utilidata Announces Michigan-Based Manufacturing Partnership And Opening Of Innovation Lab

(PORTLAND, OR — March 23, 2023) Utilidata, an industry leading grid-edge technology company, announced today that Portland General Electric (PGE) will pilot Utilidata’s smart grid chip, a first-of-its-kind distributed artificial intelligence (AI) platform, in Oregon.

Utilidata’s smart grid chip, powered by the NVIDIA Jetson platform, is a new distributed AI platform installed alongside electric meters that integrates distributed energy resources (DERs) including solar, battery storage, and electric vehicles (EVs) and enhances resiliency of the electric grid. Leveraging NVIDIA accelerated computing and AI technology, the smart grid chip collects and analyzes large amounts of granular data at the edge of the grid in real-time. With this open, software-defined platform electric utilities expect to be able to seamlessly add more clean energy, reduce power outages, enable quicker storm recovery, and ultimately lower the cost of grid operations. The smart grid chip’s open software design also allows PGE and their partners to develop custom applications and solutions.

Smart grid chips are anticipated to be installed within PGE’s Smart Grid Test Bed, which incentivizes customers to use smart-home technologies. This first phase of the deployment will provide initial real-time visibility at the edge of the grid and support PGE’s decarbonization transition. Ultimately, this positions PGE to scale the next generation of distributed intelligence across a modern grid.

“In Oregon, we are experiencing the impacts of climate change first-hand and recognize the urgent need for innovation at the grid edge as we transition to a clean energy future,” said Ananth Sundaram, Senior Manager of Integrated Grid at Portland General Electric. “Investing in new technologies for the grid is a key strategy for PGE to achieve its climate goals and provide customers with clean, affordable, and resilient energy.”

PGE serves over 900,000 customers and has ambitious greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets, including an 80 percent reduction in baseline GHG emissions from power served to retail customers. To meet these targets, PGE aims to source 25 percent of its peak load, which is when energy demand and costs are highest, from clean energy resources at the edge of the grid such as residential rooftop solar and batteries. The smart grid chip will enable PGE to better leverage these DERs to meet its goals.

“Modernizing grid infrastructure in time to meet essential decarbonization goals requires transformational leadership,” said Jess Melanson, Utilidata President and Chief Operating Officer. “Utilidata is proud to work with Portland General Electric, an innovative partner who understands the value of making investments to not only solve today’s challenges, but to prepare for the dramatic changes the grid will face in the coming years. We are inspired by PGE’s commitment to innovation and look forward to working together to transform grid operations and better serve PGE customers.”

“No industry stands to gain as much from the forces of AI and machine learning as in energy,” said Marc Spieler, Head of Global Energy Business Development at NVIDIA. “With AI, we now have the technology to deploy an intelligent energy grid that is more reliable, secure, and efficient – and in collaboration with Utilidata and PGE, NVIDIA is working to create an intelligent energy infrastructure for a sustainable future, expanding our work in Oregon.”

PGE’s Smart Grid Test Bed is a community-driven approach to managing energy use and demand to accelerate the clean energy transition. The test bed spans three neighborhoods with over 20,000 participating customers who are incentivized to use smart-home technologies, such as thermostats, water heaters, EV chargers, and batteries, to gain better control over their energy use and carbon footprint while helping PGE operate the grid more efficiently.


Utilidata is a technology company bringing distributed artificial intelligence (AI) to the edge of the electric grid to accelerate decarbonization and better serve utility customers. The company’s smart grid chip, powered by NVIDIA, is the utility industry’s first scalable distributed AI solution, and provides an open, future-proof platform for grid operations. For more information, visit utilidata.com or follow 

Utilidata’s Distributed AI To Be Deployed With Portland General Electric

(PROVIDENCE, RI – March 15, 2023) Utilidata announced today that the company is working with NVIDIA to develop and deploy a lower-cost, lower-power module to deliver real-time AI at the edge of the grid. The purpose-built module will leverage the NVIDIA Jetson platform and power Utilidata’s smart grid chip, a distributed AI platform installed alongside electric meters to enhance grid resiliency, lower grid operations costs, and integrate distributed energy resources (DERs) — including solar, energy storage, and electric vehicles (EVs) — accelerating the transition to a decarbonized grid. The module will be deployed with Utilidata’s smart grid chips beginning in 2024.

“With edge AI, electric grids can be made more intelligent, reliable, secure, sustainable, and efficient,” said Deepu Talla, vice president of embedded and edge computing at NVIDIA. “Over 1 million developers and 6,000 partners and customers have adopted NVIDIA Jetson to benefit many of the world’s largest industries, and this initiative with Utilidata will bring transformative technology to accelerate the clean energy transition.”

The new purpose-built module will bring the necessary computational power via a graphics processing unit (GPU) to the edge of the grid at a power consumption, price point, and security standard that lowers the overall cost of decarbonization while accelerating the clean energy transition and improving reliability and resiliency of the grid.

“Utilidata’s smart grid chip, with the first-ever purpose-built AI module for the grid, will transform how utilities operate the grid edge to better serve their customers,” said Josh Brumberger, Utilidata’s CEO. “By working with NVIDIA on a custom module, we are able to make edge AI accessible to all utilities and significantly drive down the cost of electrifying transportation, add more solar and energy storage to customers’ homes and businesses, and greatly increase the reliability of the grid.”

Utilidata began collaborating with NVIDIA 

 to develop the smart grid chip using the NVIDIA® Jetson Nano™ system-on-module. These first-generation devices were installed in 2022 for a 

demonstration project in Lake Placid, New York

, at customer locations along the circuit that serves the Olympic Bobsled Complex. Smart grid chips deployed in 2023 with multiple utility partners will be powered by the 

The new purpose-built module contains a specific-sized memory block for grid edge data, optimized clock speeds of the central processing unit (CPU) and GPU to maximize energy efficiency, and a customized number of cores to optimize the cost of the module. It is specifically designed to rapidly process measurements like waveform data from the grid and continuously generate AI models for uses such as granular demand forecasting, identifying pre-outage conditions, and interconnecting new DERs to the grid. This smaller-sized module will be easier to add directly into grid edge devices like EV chargers, solar inverters, and meters. The open hardware and software architecture empowers third-party developers to integrate proprietary software and build new grid-edge applications, using standard metrology, data processing, and DER interaction tools.

The edge of the electric grid, where customers’ homes and businesses connect to the utility system, is becoming exponentially more complex. As more people shift to producing and storing their own energy with solar, batteries, and EVs, powerful computation is needed to process massive amounts of data within seconds and provide grid operators with visibility, information, and tools to enhance reliability, enable demand flexibility, and adapt to a new way of operating the grid. Edge AI accelerates complex computation and decisions where data is being generated by energy consumers, rather than sending large amounts of complex data to a central cloud computing data center, which increases costs and latency, and delays real-time decision making.

Utilidata’s smart grid chip collects and analyzes grid edge data to provide utility companies with real-time visibility into grid performance and capacity. This enables utilities to seamlessly add more clean energy and reduce the cost of existing grid operations or upgrading existing grid infrastructure. The smart grid chip processes waveform data with continuous monitoring and pattern recognition to inform real-time decisions on the grid in split seconds, instead of minutes or hours, which increases reliability and resolves issues with power distribution before outages occur.

NVIDIA Jetson is a leading AI-at-the-edge computing platform with over a million developers using it for edge AI and robotics. With pre-trained AI models, developer SDKs and support for cloud-native technologies across the full Jetson lineup, manufacturers of intelligent machines and AI developers can build and deploy high-quality, software-defined features on embedded and edge devices targeting robotics, AIoT, energy, smart cities, healthcare, industrial applications, and more.

About Utilidata
Utilidata is a technology company bringing distributed artificial intelligence (AI) to the edge of the electric grid to accelerate decarbonization and better serve utility customers. The company’s smart grid chip, powered by NVIDIA, is the utility industry’s first scalable distributed AI solution, and provides an open, scalable and future-proof platform for grid operations. For more information, visit 

Welcome to the smart meter’s second act

A new generation of AI-powered grid-edge technologies will need to avoid the pitfalls that plagued the first wave of advanced metering infrastructure.

RFP Opportunities

Request for Proposals for the Installation of 1,000 Meter Adapters in Lake Placid, NY (extended deadline)

Stories

Utilidata Announces Development of a Custom Module for AI at the Edge of the Grid

“With edge AI, electric grids can be made more intelligent, reliable, secure, sustainable, and efficient,” said Deepu Talla, vice president of embedded and edge computing at NVIDIA.

Integrating Smart and Digital Innovations Across the Grid

An interview with Dr. Elizabeth Cook, Director of Advanced Grid Systems & Grid Modernization at Duquesne Light Company

Utilidata, Brooks Utility Products of Novi Announce Manufacturing Partnership, Innovation Lab

The partnership with Brooks Utility Products will bring the product to full commercialization in 2023.

Impacts of EV charging on electrical grid focus of new AI study

Researchers at the University of Michigan will partner with a power grid technology company to study how electric vehicle driving and charging behavior impacts the electric grid.

RI-based Utilidata to manufacture smart grid chip in Michigan

Utilidata and NVIDIA say they have developed an artificial intelligence platform to support a next-generation power grid. Such technology aims to enable the integration of distributed energy resources, or DERs.

Press Releases

Utilidata Formally Brands its Distributed AI Platform Karman

October 16, 2023

Utilidata Partners With The University Of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) On Electric Vehicle Charging Behavior Study

May 23, 2023

Utilidata Announces Michigan-Based Manufacturing Partnership And Opening Of Innovation Lab

April 27, 2023

Utilidata’s Distributed AI To Be Deployed With Portland General Electric

March 23, 2023

Utilidata Announces Development Of A Custom Module For AI At The Edge Of The Grid

March 15, 2023

Videos

Meet Karman, an AI platform for the grid edge

Join Utilidata

225 Dyer Street
CIC - 2nd Floor,
Providence, RI
02903

401.383.5800

Get in touch

Welcome to the smart meter’s second act

A new generation of AI-powered grid-edge technologies will need to avoid the pitfalls that plagued the first wave of advanced metering infrastructure.

RFP Opportunities

Request for Proposals for the Installation of 1,000 Meter Adapters in Lake Placid, NY (extended deadline)

Stories

Utilidata Announces Development of a Custom Module for AI at the Edge of the Grid

“With edge AI, electric grids can be made more intelligent, reliable, secure, sustainable, and efficient,” said Deepu Talla, vice president of embedded and edge computing at NVIDIA.

Integrating Smart and Digital Innovations Across the Grid

An interview with Dr. Elizabeth Cook, Director of Advanced Grid Systems & Grid Modernization at Duquesne Light Company

Utilidata, Brooks Utility Products of Novi Announce Manufacturing Partnership, Innovation Lab

The partnership with Brooks Utility Products will bring the product to full commercialization in 2023.

Impacts of EV charging on electrical grid focus of new AI study

Researchers at the University of Michigan will partner with a power grid technology company to study how electric vehicle driving and charging behavior impacts the electric grid.

RI-based Utilidata to manufacture smart grid chip in Michigan

Utilidata and NVIDIA say they have developed an artificial intelligence platform to support a next-generation power grid. Such technology aims to enable the integration of distributed energy resources, or DERs.

Press Releases

Utilidata Formally Brands its Distributed AI Platform Karman

October 16, 2023

Utilidata Partners With The University Of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) On Electric Vehicle Charging Behavior Study

May 23, 2023

Utilidata Announces Michigan-Based Manufacturing Partnership And Opening Of Innovation Lab

April 27, 2023

Utilidata’s Distributed AI To Be Deployed With Portland General Electric

March 23, 2023

Utilidata Announces Development Of A Custom Module For AI At The Edge Of The Grid

March 15, 2023

Videos

Meet Karman, an AI platform for the grid edge

Join Utilidata

225 Dyer Street CIC - 2nd Floor,Providence, RI02903

401.383.5800

Get in touch

225 Dyer Street
CIC - 2nd Floor,
Providence, RI
02903