Amsterdam-based Lucend today announced that it has raised €2.7 million ($3.3 million) in Seed funding to bring its transparent data centre optimisation to the U.S. market, helping enterprises illuminate complex operational environments.
The round was led by Remarkable Ventures Climate (RVC), other investors include Mitsubishi Electric’s Innovation Fund, New Climate Ventures, Avesta Fund, and Stepchange Ventures with support from their current investor, 4impact capital.
“Lucend’s Transparent AI platform analyses billions of data points daily and provides prescriptive recommendations that data centre operators can review and choose whether or not to implement,” says Jasper de Vries, co-founder of Lucend. “Lucend’s human-in-the-loop approach removes risk by ensuring human oversight as operators develop trust in our recommendations that increases efficiency and reliability, and enables new approaches to maintenance and replacement decisions.”
Lucend’s Seed round sits within a broader set of sizeable European investments in AI-driven infrastructure, data-centre technology and energy optimisation in 2025.
In the UK, London-based Nscale raised a €958 million Series B to scale its AI cloud and data-centre infrastructure platform. In Germany, Darmstadt-based etalytics extended its Series A to €16 million to expand its AI-powered energy optimisation software across energy-intensive environments, including data-centre-adjacent use cases. Also in Germany, Stuttgart-based Q.ANT secured €62 million to advance photonic processors designed to deliver more energy-efficient computing for AI and high-performance workloads.
Taken together, these rounds represent over €1 billion of capital flowing into adjacent areas of the data-centre and AI infrastructure stack in 2025, providing context for Lucend’s more targeted Seed funding focused on software-led operational efficiency rather than new hardware or capacity build-out.
“As AI’s demand for data centres grows, data centre operators need to prioritise efficiency and uptime while also conserving resources like energy and water,” adds René Gompel, co-founder, “Lucend and our Transparent AI platform open a pathway to consistent, measurable efficiency improvements while increasing uptime, without new CapEx, and without disrupting existing operations, while saving some of our customers millions in annual operating cost.”
Founded in 2023, Lucend is a global technology company that aims to deliver daily clarity for data center operations through Transparent AI. Formerly known as Coolgradient, Lucend turns existing data into clear, verifiable optimisations that empower operators to make smarter, faster, and more confident decisions while remaining in control.
Co-founders Jasper de Vries and René Gompel each bring 20 years of technology experience and leadership across a variety of technology companies and industries.
Lucend’s Transparent AI platform connects to existing infrastructure, no new hardware required, to transform static systems into adaptive, self-learning environments. The software takes existing sensor data to see connections across 300 billion sensor readings.
According to Lucend, their AI analyses billions of data points daily and provides prescriptive recommendations.
Komi Matsubara, Executive Officer (Vice President, Business Innovation), Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, says: “Lucend has strong competitiveness in AI-driven data centre optimisation technologies, and we expect its solutions to significantly improve data centre operational efficiency and reduce costs. By combining our hardware and infrastructure control technologies with Lucend’s AI platform, we aim to deliver greater value to our customers and strengthen our competitiveness in the data center business.”
Lucend has been implementing its AI solution across dozens of data centers since 2023, spanning Melbourne, Singapore, Paris, London, Amsterdam and Chicago.
Working with global data center operators like Digital Realty, Global Switch and T5, Lucend has collected data from different climates and designs, working with closed-loop systems, adiabatic cooling designs, cooling and electrical assets like chillers, IACs, UPSs and generators or data points like valve openings, fan speeds, temperature setpoints and
pressures.
More than half of all global data centers are located in the U.S., making it a key market for Lucend.
To-date, Lucend customers have reportedly achieved:
- ~40% reduction in power use effectiveness (PUE)
- ~25% reduction in power use
- ~30% reduction in water use
- ~40% improvement in team efficiency
“Lucend is a category-defining company led by a world-class team. Jasper de Vries brings deep AI and product leadership and built an intuitive platform UI, with field results that outperform peers,” notes Murat Aktihanoglu, Managing Partner, Remarkable Ventures Climate (RVC). “René Gompel complements with decades of B2B software experience and prior entrepreneurial success. The team’s early insight into this market, years before the AI boom, has positioned them well ahead of competitors, many of whom are just now entering the space.”
As per comments by the company, the regulatory environment adds urgency for maximising data centers’ resource efficiency. While no federal efficiency mandate exists, state and local regulations are tightening:
- New York State penalises high electricity-consuming facilities under local sustainability
frameworks. - Santa Clara, California requires operators to allocate part of a substation’s capacity to surrounding customers, limiting available energy.
At the federal level, the White House’s July 2025 directive on accelerating data centre permitting underscores the need to scale capacity efficiently while meeting local energy constraints.
Murat continues, “Energy availability is critical to the transformation of power transmission for data centre operators, cloud providers, and large enterprises. Lucend offers an immediate solution to capture the massive opportunity in the U.S., and we are excited to work with the team to accelerate the company’s growth in 2026 and beyond.”
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/01/dutch-data-centre-optimisation-startup-lucend-raises-e2-7-million-to-expand-the-u-s/
