SEW.AI began by making utility self-service less painful. Now it wants to connect the customer, the field crew and the grid - without asking a century-old industry to rip out everything underneath.
A Pittsburgh smart-grid company survived the collapse of its original broadband thesis by learning to control the least glamorous machines on the grid. Its reward: a utility software business built around farm pumps, real-time measurement and a newly acquired second act inside CLEAResult.
Milsoft began with a pencil, a calculator and one engineer’s circuit model. Thirty-seven years later, more than 1,000 utilities use its software to find faults, dispatch crews, answer anxious callers and keep the grid’s many databases speaking the same language.
The company most people have never heard of is quietly running the app, the bill and the payment page behind millions of power and water accounts. VertexOne sells utilities the one thing they rarely build well themselves: a modern customer experience.
Neara is a Sydney-founded software company that builds physics-enabled digital twins of utility networks. By combining LiDAR, satellite imagery, sensor data, AI and engineering-grade physics simulation, it creates geometrically accurate 3D replicas of power grids so utilities can model how their assets behave under real-world stress - wildfires, floods, storms, heat and rising demand. The platform lets operators find spare grid capacity, mitigate risk, plan maintenance and connect renewables faster, often replacing months of manual field inspection with analysis that runs in minutes. In February 2026 Neara raised an AUD $90 million Series D, reaching a roughly AUD $1.1 billion valuation to become one of Australia's newest unicorns.
Sun-Net Inc. is a San Jose, California software company that has built outage-coordination and operations-logging software for electric, gas, and water utilities since 1999. Its flagship iTOA suite (integrated Tools for Operations Application) is a web-based, HTML5 system of record that handles outage request scheduling, switching order management and tagging, electronic logging, automatic outage reporting, event analysis, and NERC compliance reporting. The platform runs in more than 100 control centers across 80+ utility companies, including Fortune 500 operators like Duke Energy, American Electric Power, and FirstEnergy, helping grid operators work safely, reliably, and with less paperwork.