A little over a decade ago, Seyed Madaeni went to a startup meetup in San Francisco and felt like the odd one out. He was working on clean energy at Pacific Gas & Electric. Everyone else, it seemed, was building the next social app. "It was lonely working on clean energy," he later said. "When I went to meetups in the city, it felt like if you weren't working on Facebook, you weren't cool."
That loneliness turned out to be a head start. The problem he chose to spend his career on - how to make the buying, selling, and dispatching of electricity efficient - has since become one of the most valuable questions in technology. Data centers training AI models now wait years for the grid to connect them. The bottleneck for the smartest software on earth is, of all things, electrons. And Madaeni has been building the tools to route those electrons intelligently since before it was fashionable.
01 / THE THESISPower, not compute, is the ceiling
Today Madaeni is co-founder and CEO of Verse, a San Francisco company whose software helps large organizations understand, plan, and manage clean energy. Its flagship platform, Aria, is built to simplify a process that most Fortune 500 companies still run through a patchwork of spreadsheets - despite spending billions of dollars a year on electricity. A newer product, Dispatch Intelligence, manages on-site renewable resources so that facilities can run as flexible load and sidestep the grid queues that stall new construction.
The insight underneath the company is deceptively simple: there is enough electricity for the AI buildout, if the workloads line up with when clean power is actually generated. It is a timing problem more than a supply problem. Software, not steel, is the fix.
Investors bought the thesis. In June 2026, Verse raised a $54 million Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from NVIDIA's venture arm, GV, and Norrsken VC. The round brought the company's total funding to roughly $80 million. When a chipmaker known for selling the shovels of the AI gold rush writes a check to an energy-software startup, it is a signal about where the real constraint now sits.
02 / THE PATHTehran, Ohio, and a very long apprenticeship
Madaeni did not arrive at energy software by accident. He earned a bachelor's and master's in electrical engineering from the University of Tehran, then a PhD in systems engineering - operations research - from Ohio State University, where he built mathematical models to make energy markets run more efficiently. That academic foundation, equal parts electricity and optimization, is essentially the blueprint for everything he has built since.
His resume reads like a tour of the modern energy transition. He started at PG&E. He worked on grid-facing software at SolarCity and Tesla before either was a household name for anything but cars and rooftops. Then he became CEO of Advanced Microgrid Solutions, where he pioneered a wholesale market bidding product - software that decides, minute by minute, when a battery should charge and when it should sell power back into the market. That product worked well enough that Fluence, the storage giant, acquired the company.
At Fluence, as Chief Digital Officer, he ran the digital business unit through the company's public offering and helped grow its renewable portfolio to more than 10 gigawatts. Selling your company and then helping the buyer go public is an unusual second act. Leaving all of that to start over is a third act that only a certain kind of founder attempts.
03 / THE COMPANYKilling the energy spreadsheet
Verse's founding observation is almost funny when you say it out loud: some of the largest companies in the world manage enormous energy budgets the way a freelancer tracks invoices. Aria replaces that with a system - one that lets a company see its options, model the tradeoffs, and buy clean power in the most economical way to hit its emissions goals. The customer and backer list already includes names like Walmart, Meta, BASF, LyondellBasell, and Stryker.
The Dispatch Intelligence side of the business is where the AI story gets concrete. If a data center can shape its power draw around available clean generation - leaning on batteries and on-site resources when the grid is tight - it can come online without waiting years for a new interconnection. Verse frames that as a way to shave years off the timeline for getting AI infrastructure powered up. It is a big claim, and the market is about to test it in public.
04 / THE PERSONThe CEO who will also pick your dinner spot
For all the systems engineering, colleagues describe a leader who prizes tight, cross-functional teams - engineers and non-engineers "working closely with each other on problems," as he puts it, with a premium on agility. And there is a lighter footnote to the founder-CEO grind. In a year-end employee spotlight, Verse noted that Madaeni is a serious food enthusiast: if you are ever in the Bay Area and need a restaurant recommendation, he is the person to ask. It is a small thing, but it says something about how culture gets built - in the details, not the mission statements.
He has also become a public voice for the field he once found lonely. He is a member of the Forbes Business Council and has spoken at CERAWeek on accelerating corporate clean energy adoption. His hope is openly stated: that climate technology is finally cool enough to pull more bright minds toward the hard problems. Given who is now funding his company, that shift looks less like a hope and more like a fact.
There is a clean symmetry to the arc. The person who felt out of place at a San Francisco meetup because he was not building a social network is now building the layer that keeps the world's most demanding computers powered. The uncool bet became the essential one. And the question he picked in graduate school - how do you make energy markets efficient - turned out to be worth a career, a company, and, if Verse is right, a meaningful piece of how AI actually gets built.