DNV Ventures invests in energy transition software leader Gridcog to advance transparent modeling of energy flexibility
Gridcog is the complete and transparent digital platform for modelling energy flexibility, letting energy professionals model generation, storage, flexible load, grid constraints, network tariffs and market participation across the full project lifecycle.
The company was co-founded by Fabian Le Gay Brereton (CEO) and Pete Tickler (CPO), repeat founders focused on the energy transition in Australia. Gridcog is now headquartered in the UK with offices in London, Berlin, Madrid, Perth, and Melbourne.
Gridcog’s mission is to replace slow, error-prone spreadsheets with fast, transparent, and auditable simulations, letting developers, energy majors, and consultants make faster and smarter investment decisions.
For complex energy projects, the old tools can’t keep up
The energy transition is no longer about simply building more renewables — it is about making renewables-heavy power systems work. That means more storage, more flexible load and smarter use of scarce grid connections. As a result, the most important projects are no longer stand-alone: developers increasingly need to model solar, wind, battery storage and flexible load together behind a single grid connection, across different markets, tariffs and contract structures such as PPAs and merchant offtake.
The tools teams have relied on have not kept up: black-box models they cannot check, tools built for a single use case, and spreadsheets that are slow and error-prone. Regulators are raising the bar too, with hybridisation rules in Spain and Germany and battery storage roadmaps elsewhere now requiring detailed pre-feasibility studies. The result is clear demand for fast, trustworthy tools that let developers and their advisors model these scenarios and deliver bankable insight when decisions matter most.
Gridcog: from weeks to hours, with no black box
Gridcog gives energy professionals one complete, transparent platform to model the project they are actually going to build — not a rough approximation. Its modular design lets users assemble detailed models of complex energy projects and run interval-level, bottom-up simulations in hours rather than weeks, covering the full project lifecycle from first concept to investment decision.
Core components include a Designer for configuring projects, a Library of pre-loaded data and market rules, a cloud-based Simulator, and Reports & Results modules for analysis and export, supported by Gridcog's team of energy experts.
A "no black box" philosophy keeps every assumption visible and every result traceable to the interval, all backed by rigorous computational modelling and mathematical optimisation. The people using Gridcog stay in complete control.
Crucially, it spans PPA and merchant revenue modelling and full cashflow analysis across solar, wind, storage and flexible load — capabilities that would otherwise require several separate tools.
"DNV is one of the most trusted names in energy, and trust is exactly what Gridcog is built on. We already use DNV's data through Solcast, so combining their data and advisory expertise with our modelling technology is a natural fit — helping developers make more bankable decisions far earlier. I'm excited to build that with the DNV team," said Fabian Le Gay Brereton, CEO and Co-Founder of Gridcog.
Well positioned for growth
Since expanding into Europe, Gridcog has demonstrated strong product-market fit and commercial momentum, most notably in Europe, a geography currently representing most of the clients and revenue.
To date, clients have modeled tens of thousands of renewable energy projects across every continent on the platform, and Gridcog now serves dozens of customers, including some of the world's largest energy transition companies. Among several data sources, the platform already integrates data from Solcast, a leading solar data provider recently acquired by DNV in 2023.
Series A funding round and strategic partnership with DNV
Gridcog has raised a £7 million Series A round to fund its European expansion, selective entry into new markets, and continued product development. The oversubscribed round assembles a strong strategic syndicate: it is led by ABB Electrification Ventures, with participation from Verbund Ventures, Axpo Ventures, and DNV Ventures. A group of notable industrials that we are eager to work with in supporting Gridcog’s future development.
DNV Ventures was first introduced to the founders of Gridcog as an outcome of a screening project for grid technology companies, run with Powerhouse in the autumn of 2025. Since then, several colleagues in DNV Energy Systems have engaged with Gridcog through product demonstrations and strategy workshops, confirming strong complementarity with DNV’s offering.
The partnership is designed to let DNV engage with renewable energy project developers earlier in the project lifecycle, at the pre-feasibility stage, combining Gridcog’s fast scenario modeling with DNV’s global data and advisory expertise to deliver scalable, bankable insights for hybrid and co-located energy projects.
“Gridcog turns weeks of spreadsheet modeling into hours of fast, transparent analysis, a natural complement to DNV's data and advisory expertise. Accelerating energy transition projects is essential to meeting global decarbonization targets, and by bringing our trusted data into Gridcog's platform, we can help developers make faster, more bankable decisions far earlier in a project's life. We're excited to invest with ABB, Axpo and Verbund, and to collaborate with these notable industrials as owners, looking forward to support the Gridcog team in scaling across Europe and beyond”, says Kaare Helle, Venture Director, DNV Ventures.