Traverse Technologies Secures US$2.2M Seed Round

Singapore, San Francisco

Traverse Technologies (Traverse) is building a software platform to help infrastructure project developers design and build lower risk, higher performance projects globally through the automation of civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering workflows.

The McKinsey Global Infrastructure Initiative estimates that up to 40% of the US$ 3 - 4 trillion spent on global infrastructure annually is poorly deployed for various technical and market reasons. Traverse's vision is to help developers plan and build the most efficient projects in the world by using AI and software to make techno-economic assessments of complex projects 100x faster and cheaper.

We are delighted to announce that we have closed a US$ 2.2 million seed funding round from Gagarin Capital, Golden Gate Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, and Y Combinator to help us achieve this vision.

Traverse's technology has currently been applied in hydropower, onshore wind, and offshore wind. Through HydroDesk and WindDesk, Traverse has performed technical and commercial assessments of over 10 GW (~US$ 2 billion in real value) of hydropower plants and wind farms for utilities, independent power producers, and renewable energy developers.

“Traverse is our designated wind and site engineer for our 6 GW pipeline of offshore wind projects in Japan. Working with Traverse makes us feel like they're part of our in-house team and we appreciate their relentless support without any time barriers. They have helped us achieve extraordinary commercial clarity in every step of the development process due to the exhaustive and precise nature of their simulations. Internally we no longer have to care about investigative time and costs and that freedom is absolutely delightful. "What if we want to try this configuration instead? What if we used this equipment model instead?" questions get easily answered in less than 24 hours by Traverse: "Done. Here’s all the reports, spreadsheets, drawings and the IRR. And here’s five more equipment models we tried." - Mohan Kumar, Director of Development at Influx Inc.

Traverse uses a delicate balance of AI, human-in-the-loop interfaces, and cloud-based supercompute to reduce engineering design work by 95%, which leads to material techno-commercial improvements. This means a project development team who was previously working on 10 wind farms can now work on 100 in parallel. And for each of these 100 projects, the team can generate millions of potential technical and financial configuration permutations. Since 9 out of 10 projects developed never reach construction, this is a 10- to 100-fold increase in managing and mitigating project pipeline risks.

Traverse allows expert engineers and project development colleagues to do what they do best: exercise human judgment on the remaining 5% of the work, get more projects done and have more backup projects on standby. They can now strategically pre-empt risks before they occur and react rapidly to issues that materialise.

Why We Founded Traverse

Infrastructure projects require large amounts of planning and financing together with years of development before they even begin construction. During this time, developers undertake massive technical, environmental, regulatory, social, and land acquisition challenges that are intertwined in complicated ways.

If for example, a landowner won't sell a small plot of land or there are critically endangered frog species, the developer has to move one of or all the turbines to a new place. Does the wind blow there? Is the new place full of hard rock? It can take months to years to discover these feasibility details but developers have to keep the lights on during this time.

There are also many other project developers in the running. The offtaker holds reverse auctions for the project’s power purchase price. We don't just need a feasible project, we need the best project to win against the competition. More specifically, we need a risk-adjusted pool of efficient projects so that we have the resilience and buffer to lose and drop projects that are not working out.

Traverse was founded with the idea that this repeated, multi-dimensional assessment of project feasibility amongst time, people and space, should be aided by modern computational prowess. Data gathering is complex but the moment we have new project information, we should be able to instantaneously produce an updated and bankable technical assessment and financial model. If we can do this, we can also pre-simulate millions to trillions of scenarios in a specific project or investigate more projects across a country. We can now see the future.

Team

Traverse is made up of a highly collaborative and multidisciplinary team of computer scientists, private equity professionals and mechanical/civil engineers. Our team members have engineered, developed, financed, and constructed billions of dollars of power assets and also built e-commerce platforms used concurrently by over one hundred million users. We have offices in Singapore and San Francisco.

Our advisory board consists of Andrew Affleck, Bernhard Raberger, Josh Grubaugh and Susana Vivares, all of whom have decades of power and infrastructure experience.

We would like to thank our customers, investors, colleagues, and advisors who choose to believe in this vision to revolutionize professional engineering and reduce the cost of public infrastructure.