UK energy tech startup Yottar has secured £1 million ($1.2m) in pre-seed funding led by Haatch, with additional investment from Cape Capital.

Exmouth-based Yottar has developed a solution to help energy asset developers identify locations with reliable grid access without having to pay upfront application fees to distribution network operators (DNOs).

The company aggregates network data from Grid Supply Points, providing energy asset developers with the information and tools needed to find locations with spare capacity and secure a grid connection. The company claims to provide up-to-date information by maintaining a constantly updated digital twin of the energy grid.

In addition to the data from the DNOs, Yottar also licenses proprietary, non-public data and refreshes its records with anonymized information from customers’ successful grid connections.

“The electrification super cycle is colliding with the AI data center boom. That’s making the grid operators really struggle to deal with the backlog,” Peter Clutton-Brock, Yottar’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.

Yottar’s proprietary algorithm is also able to estimate the likelihood of a grid connection being approved, expected timelines for availability, and the amount of power that can be reliably drawn.

“There are a few other people playing in the space. Different people tackled slightly different use cases,” Clutton-Brock said to TechCrunch. “The use case that we’re after is what we’ve called medium-sized demand developers, so people using electricity rather than generating it.” Generally, the projects range between 1 and 5MW, he said.

The company already has several notable clients, including The Crown Estate, Tesla, and the NHS, which is planning its own rollout of EV charging infrastructure. Currently, clients are charged a per-user fee along with a usage-based cost tied to the number of sites they assess.

While the company is focusing on the UK at the moment, it is open to expansion into the US and further afield.