Congratulations to David Bromberg, Larry Pileggi, and Hui Zheng, the co-founders of Pearl Street Technologies on their acquisition by Enverus. Pear is thankful for the opportunity to have been a seed investor.
I have known Larry for 25 years (!) when I was exploring an academic career and he was just starting at Carnegie Mellon University. Larry is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant and impactful researchers in the EDA (Electronic Design Automation) industry, advancing simulation techniques for electronic circuits and power systems, making them more efficient and scalable.
Larry introduced me to his post-doc David Bromberg back in 2015 with these words “David is really a brilliant guy, and can do anything”. Larry, as expected, was right. David joined our portfolio company Aurora Solar late 2015 and became one the key early engineers there.
When David and Larry first reached out about Pearl Street in early 2018, I was first reluctant (selling to utilities? hard!), but they proved me wrong. Larry’s lab had developed SUGAR™ (Simulation with Unified Grid Analyses and Renewables), a breakthrough simulation tool that made it possible to simulate modern power grids – especially complex ones with high levels of renewable energy integration and distributed energy resources. They borrowed some techniques from traditional electronic circuit design and applied them to a new system, power flow analysis.
As true entrepreneurs, Larry and David did not listen to the naysayers and proceeded to build Pearl Street. They funded the company with non-dilutive grant funding from NSF, ARPA-E, DOE, DARPA. By the time we got involved in early 2022, they had signed an initial proof of concept signed with an ISO. Pearl Street had developed the only automated and practical solution for modern grid simulation. Why was that important? Our grid is already not reliable but we are expecting energy demand to keep growing. Although there is interest from investors and power developers to connect more renewable projects to the grid, the interconnection queue backlog keeps growing (2.4 Terawatts of proposed projects waiting in nationwide interconnection queues today!). Why? Partially because we cannot simulate the impact of a project to the health of our grid – but Pearl Street changes this. Pearl St. is the only practical grid simulation technology and will be key to connect new generation capacity online faster.
It has been an amazing journey working with Pearl Street. Strategizing around our ISO and our developer products, moving to an in person culture and overcoming challenges. Along the way, we’ve helped make a handful of critical hires, navigating new talent pools and finding ways to hire very specific talent in constrained markets. Building a company isn’t always easy, but we’ve been happy to be Larry & David’s first call whenever they’ve needed anything.