Getting More from the Grid

Why We Invested in Nyquis

Evan Tana · November 5, 2026

The electrical grid is the largest machine humanity has ever built—and one of our most consequential inventions. Yet for more than a century, we’ve operated it in largely the same way: under-instrumented and mostly blind to what is actually happening on the wires.

That blind spot has never mattered more. Grid faults have sparked wildfires that caused billions of dollars in damage. At the same time, this aging infrastructure is being asked to support an AI-driven surge in electricity demand. Because operators lack visibility into the grid, they can’t fully utilize the capacity already there. A system this important, this poorly observed, and this essential to our future is exactly the kind of problem Nyquis was built to solve.

Nyquis makes a hardware sensor that attaches directly to a utility circuit at the substation, giving grid operators visibility into things nobody can reliably see today. Sitting at the root layer—directly on the physics of the line—it reads electrical waveforms in real time and detects subtle anomalies and high-impedance faults long before they become a downed line or a spark. Nyquis is already monitoring hundreds of miles of distribution feeders across New Mexico, where it has helped utilities identify and remediate faults their existing systems couldn’t see—including four potential ignition events in a single four-month period.

Daniel J. Hunter began his time at SPC as a member resident, exploring a range of ideas before landing on Nyquis. I interviewed him as he was joining the community and came away struck by both his technical brilliance and his depth. Dan is a self-taught polymath. He grew up building houses and doing electrical work, conducted biology research at Stanford, and then cofounded Yoshi, where he personally built the company’s first twenty mobile fueling trucks. When Yoshi expanded into mobile EV charging, Dan led the effort to reverse-engineer GM’s CAN bus.

He partnered with Steve A. Bukowski, PhD, PE, who brings thirty years of power-systems experience from Idaho National Laboratory and utility operators. Steve is one of the few people in the world capable of training models to reliably distinguish the faint signatures of emerging faults from the noise of the grid. It’s hard to imagine a better founding team for this particular problem.

We led Nyquis’s seed round alongside Gigascale because we believe deeply in its mission: make energy dramatically cheaper by first making the grid safer, more observable, and more resilient. Nyquis has the rare opportunity to eliminate a real and present danger to communities while unlocking critical infrastructure for the next decade of compute.

That is exactly why Nyquis sits at the center of our resilient-futures axes of curiosity—and why we’re so excited to continue building this consequential company alongside Dan and Steve.