SmartHelio, the Swiss solar predictive analytics specialists, has secured new investment from technology funder quantumEDGE Ventures to develop its technology and expand into new markets.
The company said the investment, of an undisclosed sum, would support its mission to build out its AI-powered analytics platform and expand into new markets, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa.
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SmartHelio’s technology, which it calls ‘autonomous energy operations’, has been developed in response to the growing operational complexity of the modern energy system as solar, battery storage, electric vehicles and distributed energy resources scale globally.
“Energy operators are increasingly required to manage vast amounts of data, growing asset portfolios, labour shortages, grid constraints and increasingly interconnected energy systems,” the company said in a statement
Earlier this year, SmartHelio launched GAIA, an AI agent purpose-built for energy infrastructure operations. SmartHelio said that, rather than functioning as a traditional monitoring platform, GAIA continuously analyses operational data, identifies performance issues, prioritises actions based on business impact and supports operational workflows across renewable energy assets.
‘No more dasboards’
In an interview with PV Tech in late 2024, SmartHelio’s CEO, Govinda Upadhyay, offered a preview of the company’s AI agent, then known as Solar GPT, which could perform a range of operational tasks with simple user prompts.
“I believe in a world where we don’t need dashboards, we don’t need so much software,” Upadhyay said. “It’s only one chatbot; we just talk to the AI agent.”
SmartHelio said GAIA was already deployed with customers globally and is helping energy companies automate up to 90% of daily monitoring and reporting activities while improving asset performance and operational efficiency.
Unlike generic AI copilots, SmartHelio said its platform combines physics-informed intelligence, energy-domain expertise, explainability, governance and human oversight specifically designed for critical infrastructure environments. This enables organisations to adopt AI while maintaining transparency, control and operational trust.
SmartHelio said its ambitions extended beyond predictive analytics and monitoring, and that it is building AI systems capable of supporting asset owners and operators throughout the operational lifecycle, from performance optimisation and fault management to maintenance coordination and portfolio-level decision support.
“The energy system is becoming dramatically more complex. Solar, batteries, electric vehicles, microgrids and flexible loads are increasingly interacting in real time. Human operators alone cannot manage this complexity at scale,” Upadhyay said in a statement on the investment.
“We believe AI agents will become an essential part of future energy operations, helping energy companies make faster, better decisions while keeping humans firmly in control. This partnership supports our ambition to accelerate the deployment of secure and governed AI solutions across the global energy sector.”
SmartHelio said it supports more than 8GW of energy assets globally and works with utilities, independent power producers, energy service providers and enterprise energy owners across Europe, North America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Its customers and partners include Shell, Dominion Energy, ENEOS, NTT, Tata Power, Mitsui Fudosan, Verbund and Schneider Electric.
