AiGent, Inc. raised $6M in seed funding from ZIP and CIV to integrate 185 GW of existing distributed generation assets into U.S. power markets, creating AI-driven distributed power plants (DPPs).
Its AI platform aggregates and monetizes behind-the-meter generation at commercial, industrial, and mission-critical sites, turning idle backup generators into reliable grid resources that reduce costs and boost resilience without new infrastructure.
The round adds industry veteran Dan Leff and ZIP’s Alex Demeulenaere to AiGent’s board, as investors highlight the company’s rapid execution and potential to deliver lower-cost reliability and new revenue streams for asset owners.
PRESS RELEASE — AiGent, Inc., a leading developer of AI-driven distributed power plants (DPP), announced it has raised $6 million in seed funding from ZIP and CIV, in record time, to integrate 185 GW of the highest reliability set of existing generation assets into American power markets.
AiGent’s AI-based technology platform aggregates, orchestrates, and monetizes distributed generation infrastructure at commercial, industrial, and mission-critical facilities, including AI data centers, to deliver rapidly dispatchable, highly-reliable DPPs. By tapping into existing behind-the-meter distributed generation assets during system stress, AiGent helps keep the lights on, lowers costs, and provides new revenue streams to asset owners, all without the need, cost, delays, and dislocation required to build new power plants or energy infrastructure.
“Backup generators are an untapped reliability resource sitting idle across the grid,” said Stephanie Hendricks, CEO and Co-Founder of AiGent. “AiGent turns liabilities into assets, at scale, to improve grid reliability and reduce consumer costs. This support so quickly from leading investors at ZIP and CIV validates both the urgency of the problem and our team’s approach to solving it.”
Patrick Maloney, Co-Founder and CEO at CIV, added, “AiGent is unlocking a massive, underutilized fleet of 185 GW with AI-based software, controls, and market integration. The team is executing with incredible velocity and we believe their model can deliver reliability at a lower cost while creating meaningful value for generator owners and the grid.”
“At ZIP, we love backing repeat founders who know what it takes to go from zero to one, and we don’t know a better team than AiGent in that regard. Together with our friends at CIV, we’re excited to support their bold vision, in an era where satisfying power demands, increasing grid resiliency, and bringing AI to the physical infrastructure world are among the greatest imperatives,” said John Kwaak, Founder and Managing Partner at ZIP.
In addition to securing its seed funding, AiGent has added Dan Leff and Alex Demeulenaere to its board of directors. Leff is an industry veteran with more than 40 years of leadership and experience in energy and technology, and will help guide AiGent’s leadership team and strategic vision. Alex Demeulenaere joins the AiGent board as an investor and Managing Director at ZIP.
About AiGent, Inc.
Using its AI-based technology platform, AiGent aggregates, orchestrates, and monetizes distributed generation resources in power markets, delivering significant reliability, economic, and sustainability benefits to large energy users, utilities, and grid operators. To learn more visit www.aigent.energy.
About Zero Infinity Partners
ZIP is pioneering the infra-tech investing category. ZIP invests in founders and companies looking to deploy innovative technologies and business ideas in the global infrastructure sectors, including energy, power, mobility, logistics, data, water, and waste. Learn more atwww.zeroinfinitypartners.com.
About CIV
CIV is an investment firm that backs and builds technology companies in critical industries. Founded by serial entrepreneurs and investors, CIV unites deep operating expertise, catalytic capital, and a unique global network to help founders create enduring companies that shape the future. CIV was founded on a simple belief: the future belongs to those who build it. Learn more at www.civ.co.
The Dr. Pritam Singh Foundation, in collaboration with IILM University, hosted a discussion on “Human at Core: AI, Ethics, and the Future” at Tech Mahindra, Cyberabad, on Saturday, in memory of the late Dr. Pritam Singh, a noted academic.
After launching the discussion, Assembly Speaker Gaddam Prasad Kumar highlighted the ethical challenges of Artificial Intelligence (AI), warning against algorithmic bias, threats to data privacy, and job displacement. He called for large-scale reskilling and emphasised that India must shape AI technologies to reflect its values of fairness, transparency, and inclusivity. He urged corporate leaders to establish strong governance frameworks, audit algorithms for bias, and ensure responsible adoption of AI.
Delivering the keynote address, Chairman of Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI) K. Padmanabhaiah stressed India’s opportunity to leverage AI for inclusive growth across healthcare, agriculture, education, and fintech — while ensuring technology remains human-centric and trustworthy.
One of the founders of the Dr. Pritam Singh Foundation P. Dwarakanath, Director at IILM University Chaturvedi, Director at the Institute for Development & Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT) Deepak Kumar, Managing Director of Signode Asia Pacific Gaurav Maheshwari, Pritam Singh’s son Vipul Singh, and author and economist Vikas Singh spoke.
With fears about the strength of consumer spending running high due to tariffs, inflation and other economic pressures, retailers are working hard to sustain revenue growth. While some retailers are leaning into worker-led personalized experiences for shoppers, other retailers are focusing more on leveraging artificial intelligence to optimize the shopping experience.
Walmart is one of those retailers, adding new “super agents” that aims to save time and effort for both workers and shoppers. At its recent Retail Rewired innovation event, Walmart highlighted the launch of four “super agents,” which include Marty for sellers and suppliers, Sparky for shoppers, the Associate Agent and the Developer Agent.
With agents performing capabilities in the realm of payroll, paid time off, merchandising and finding the right products for any event, Walmart is consolidating its powerful, time-saving tools for the sake of a streamlined experience for multiple points of interaction with the company.
“Having a plethora of different agents can very quickly become confusing,” Suresh Kumar, chief technology officer for Walmart Global, said at the event.
The Associate Agent, for example, is “a single point of entry where any associate can find access to all of the agents we’ve built on the back end,” explained David Glick, senior vice president for Enterprise Business Solutions at Walmart. “As you speak to it more, as you work with it more, it’ll know more about you.”
The evolution comes alongside a broader shift for retail, an industry actively seeking to counteract cost concerns from consumers and the government, and Walmart isn’t alone in its push toward all things AI. Amazon’s Prime Day event over four days in July saw generative AI use jump 3,300% year over year, according to TechCrunch. Meanwhile, Google Cloud AI partnered with body care retailer Lush to visually identify projects without packaging, ultimately reducing the expense of training new hires.
Making digital twins of Walmart stores
Walmart is also all-in on physical and spatial AI, specifically digital twins (a virtual copy of any physical object or space — in Walmart’s case, their stores and clubs). Using digital twin technology powered by spatial AI, Walmart can “detect, diagnose and remediate issues up to two weeks in advance,” Brandon Ballard, group director for real estate at Walmart US, said at Retail Rewired. Using this technology comes with big savings, according to Ballard. “Last year, we cut all of our emergency alerts by 30% and we reduced our maintenance spend in refrigeration by 19% across Walmart US,” he added.
“At its core, retail is a physical business,” said Alex de Vigan, CEO and founder of Nfinite, which generates large-scale visual data for training spatial and physical AI models. “We’ve seen retailers use digital twins to reduce setup time for new promotions, reallocate labor more efficiently, and improve robotic picking accuracy, small gains that add up quickly when margins are under stress,” he said.
While the impact of digital twins may not be outwardly visible to consumers in the same way, say, Walmart’s Sparky agent is, its effects will be real. “Better stock accuracy, faster site updates and fewer order issues mean a smoother retail experience, even in a tighter economy,” said de Vigan.
Another innovation on the back end is Walmart’s use of machine learning to better understand how long it will take to get a delivery order on a customer’s doorsteps, effectively managing expectations while increasing efficiency.
As for what consumers can see, Sparky is already helping shoppers generate baskets built on an intuitive understanding of their needs. Walmart is currently working on enabling the agent to take action on reordering products, ultimately reducing the mental load that shoppers deal with.
For retailers, AI is one way to combat any slowdown in consumer spending, but we’ve yet to see how a fully integrated AI shopping experience — both in person and online — will shape our relationship with retail moving forward.
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Amid the hype over AI, a practical question: When will the technology boost the economy the way its developers and promoters are promising? Is artificial intelligence going to unleash a surge in worker productivity, as epochal new tech has done in the past? Or is investor enthusiasm for it overdone?
In one sense, AI is already adding to GDP. Spending on AI hardware is astronomical, both for the costly, specialized chips that power AI and the related infrastructure to deliver the electricity that those chips devour. This spending raised GDP by 0.3% in the second quarter of this year. Even that doesn’t fully capture the size of this investment surge, since some capital outlays that tech firms are making don’t show up in the official GDP accounting method. Just look at the top five firms by AI investment: Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle. The increase in their AI-related capital expenditures over the past two years equals about 10% of GDP gains in the U.S. over that time period. Add the power plants, transmission lines and other infrastructure they need to run their data centers, and the outlay is even bigger.
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There are also signs that businesses are gearing up for AI to make an impact on their operations. Company mentions of AI use for research tripled since Nov. 2022, when ChatGPT launched and turbocharged generative AI. 25% of job listings posted for IT professionals since the start of last year have asked for AI-related skills. The number of mobile AI app downloads hit 60 million this March. Internet searches related to AI have grown tenfold since OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT to the public. When it comes to whether AI will make workers more productive, the picture gets murkier. There are some early signs that it’s happening. Inflation-adjusted revenue per worker among S&P 500 companies has been rising since late 2022, following a 15-year period when it stayed flat.
It’s not clear why, but the overlap with advanced AI applications going mainstream is hard to ignore. But with so much money pouring into AI, there are reasons for skepticism. Much of the investment being made today could end up wasted. Many companies that are in vogue now figure to fail. It’s possible that AI computing power being rushed online could ultimately prove to be unneeded, akin to how fiber-optic cable networks got overbuilt in the 1990s. That capacity eventually got used as data consumption rose, but not before builders who spent too much on it went bankrupt. If the current AI data center boom fizzles, the pullback in spending could spark a mild recession, as the tech bust in 2001 did. Most major technological leaps take time to filter through the economy. AI does seem genuinely transformative. But the transformation may take many years.
This forecast first appeared in The Kiplinger Letter, which has been running since 1923 and is a collection of concise weekly forecasts on business and economic trends, as well as what to expect from Washington, to help you understand what’s coming up to make the most of your investments and your money. Subscribe to The Kiplinger Letter.
