Rather than build a data center and hunt for power to fill it, Rune drops compute where electricity already flows. The company raised $40M in Series A funding to scale that approach, bringing its total to $53.5M.
Spark Capital led the round. Union Square Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Activate Capital, Committed Capital, Timeless Partners and Logos Fund all joined.
Its product, RELIC, is a modular system that sits at an operating renewable plant and pulls electricity from the DC bus bar behind the inverter, before conversion to alternating current. Transformers and conversion stages that a conventional facility needs can be skipped, and Rune says a site can serve customers within six weeks.
The power it chases is already being thrown away. Solar gets curtailed when the grid cannot absorb it. Clipping wastes output whenever generation outruns an inverter’s rating. Prices that fall or turn negative make selling pointless. Compute can consume all three.
Units are built from 100-kilowatt blocks that stack into deployments above 100 MW, running bare-metal clusters of eight to 1,024 GPUs. Software watches the plant and shifts load within milliseconds, leaving the generation asset in charge of its grid obligations.
Rune reports more than 80 MW of contracted power and a pipeline past 1 GW, and is disclosing a deployment at an existing 200 MW solar site in Texas. The wager is that interconnection queues, not GPUs, become the limit on AI capacity.
