Major boost for Australian climate tech co

Australian climate software company Neara has just closed a $15.25 million funding round to support the company’s further expansion overseas, helping to accelerate the global energy transition in North America and Europe.

With participation by Prosus Ventures, the round was also supported by returning investors at Skip Capital and Square Peg Capital. The funding serves as an extension of the company’s $20 million Series B raise in 2022, bringing its funds raised to date to approximately $45 million.

Neara works at the intersection of a complex industry problem: the urgent need to replace coal-powered energy with renewables while simultaneously driving down costs for consumers. This issue has been made more challenging by the extension of coal-fired power stations beyond their original closure dates across Australia.

The company helps major network service providers (NSPs), including AusGrid, Essential Energy, Endeavour Energy, South Australia Power Networks and Transgrid, optimise their networks across a broad spectrum of critical use cases, and in some cases, identify and access existing yet untapped network capacity to accelerate clean energy timelines.

With Neara’s new System of Enablement (SoE) protocol, every energy stakeholder now has access to the same database to understand how macro factors can affect their own networks. This further enables all grid stakeholders to make better informed decisions, drive innovation and mitigate potential risks.

The funding raise is testament to the rapid adoption of Neara’s technology in Australia, Europe and the US. Investments from this latest raise will help Neara further develop its functionality and underscore its role in sourcing and accessing existing, yet untapped, network capacity for energy providers.

The platform will provide solutions for an array of decarbonisation challenges including addressing current network capacity constraints, existing infrastructure upgrade issues, hefty time and cost investments required for new infrastructure, and manual processes of connecting new generation projects to the network.

“To meet global decarbonisation goals, including in North America, Europe and Australia, the energy industry needs to significantly integrate more renewable assets,” said Neara’s Chief Commercial Officer, Jack Curtis.

“Technology plays a critical role in facilitating this transition, and this new funding will help us expand and deliver functionality to network operators, generators, regulators and customers in one unified platform, enabling them to bring renewable generation online faster and at a global scale.”

Image caption: The Neara founding team — Karamvir Singh, Daniel Danilatos and Jack Curtis.