Ex-AWS leaders bring Soma out of stealth with a plan to ease the data centre power crunch

A pair of Amazon Web Services (AWS) employees are taking their experience building the cloud operator giant’s energy systems to a new venture.

Vancouver-based energy intelligence platform Soma Energy emerged from stealth last week with $7 million USD ($9.7 million CAD) to help data centres optimize their electricity use. The company’s AI-powered platform manages how generators and battery storage interact with broader electrical infrastructure, which the startup claims reduces costs and unlocks additional power capacity.

“The answer is not simply more infrastructure, but better orchestration.”
Ath Caramanolis,
Soma Energy

Soma was founded by CEO Ath Caramanolis, CTO Mario Souto, and chief AI scientist Henrique Hoeltgebaum. Caramanolis and Souto both worked on energy systems for AWS, the world’s largest cloud provider. According to Soma, Caramanolis created AWS’s renewable energy optimization program, while Souto built a machine learning platform that managed gigawatts of solar, wind, and storage power assets at AWS.

“We saw and solved these problems at AWS 10 years ago, the grid constraints, the interconnection delays, the complexity of managing power at scale,” Caramanolis said in a statement. “We built the company because we knew there was a better way.”

As more electricity-hungry data centres boot up, the annual power demand of data centres in the United States is expected to exceed the entire power output of Texas by 2028, according to S&P Global. In Canada, the problem is also getting attention; Alberta last year added its utilities minister to the team behind its $100-billion AI data centre push.

Soma said that the generation, transmission, and interconnection capacity to meet rising power demand will take five to 10 years to come online, “which is fundamentally incompatible with the needs of AI.”

“The answer is not simply more infrastructure, but better orchestration,” Caramanolis said. “By applying AI to power plants and large energy loads in real time, we unlock flexibility that already exists and accelerate time to power today.”

The $7 million was raised across a pre-seed and seed round, the latter of which closed in the second quarter of 2025, according to a Soma spokesperson, who did not break out the funding amounts per round. The seed round was led by Category Ventures, with participation from Haystack, RRE Ventures, TO VC, Uncork Capital, as well as pre-seed investors like Panache Ventures and angel Walter Kortschak.

Soma said it is currently optimizing two gigawatts of electricity for power-producing clients and is working with five data centre customers. The new funding will be used to expand its engineering and commercial teams, as well as deploy its offering across North America.

Soma emerged from stealth just a few days after Canadian-led, New York-based ThinkLabs secured a $28-million USD ($39-million CAD) Series A round with a similar goal: to help utility providers prepare their power grid infrastructure for the incoming wave of AI data centres.

Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Photo by Scott Rodgerson.