Three years ago, my co-founder Yuval Lubowich and I set out to build the best regulatory data platform for the energy industry. HData, we decided, would make it easy to manage, understand, and share the insights previously trapped inside PDF’ified reports and hidden within mazes of dockets.
We believe it should be easy, not hard, to work with regulatory information.
Filings ought to flow from source systems through approvals and seamlessly to the government, without manual data entry. Metrics and benchmarks should be instant, appearing wherever they’re needed, and linking back to the source numbers. Generative AI should distill clarity out of turgid rate case records, citing back to its sources and never inventing them.
Energy professionals must be freed up to focus together on the meaning, not the paperwork.
The need for a better way to work with regulatory information couldn’t be more urgent. Our industry faces rising costs, aging infrastructure, and the powerful urgency of the energy transition. All of these challenges are made worse by regulatory tangles. But they correspondingly become surmountable as regulatory information gets more manageable.
To help the energy industry confront its challenges, today HData is announcing our $10 million Series A financing round, led by Buoyant Ventures and joined by over 14 other visionary investors.
Buoyant, co-founded by Allison Myers and Amy Francetic, backs innovative technologies confronting climate change. By easing the hassles of energy regulation, clarifying the facts and speeding the right decisions, HData’s RegTech platform does that.
Here’s how we got to this point and what we’re going to do next.
The heart of the HData platform is data - meticulously standardized, authoritative, and directly linked to the official sources. HData was born when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, thanks to the leadership of Chairmen Jon Wellinghoff, Neil Chatterjee (both of whom now sit on our board of advisors), and many others, replaced its old-fashioned unstructured document-based forms with useful structured XML data.
Yuval, Director of Product Management David Gruener, and our product team used the new data format to create solutions that enable digital compliance and analysis. We’ve since digitized the Energy Information Administration’s key filings and delivered tools to explore those, too.
In 2021, Alabama Power Company and Southern Company welcomed us into the Techstars Alabama EnergyTech Accelerator in Birmingham, where we raised our first seed funding, led by Hyde Park Venture Partners and co-led by Firebrand Ventures. Southern Company’s leaders worked with us to design new tools to deliver our regulatory insights faster.
Last year, as part of our partnership with Southern Company, we introduced Regulatory AI, the only generative AI technology purpose-built for energy regulation, delivering answers cited back to regulatory sources with no hallucination.
Under the leadership of Chief Revenue Officer Jeff Press, Director of Sales Erin Riley, and Director of Marketing Amy Winner, we witnessed rapid growth in our business in 2023. Meanwhile, our customer success team, led by Britt Cohen, began working alongside the most innovative companies in the energy industry, helping them leverage our platform for meaningful savings within minutes of logging in.
Buoyant Ventures is today joining the best team, bar none, I’ve ever worked with, in two decades of focusing my career on regulatory innovation. Every person in our company is doing the best, hardest work of their whole career.
And we need to be, because the challenge is immense.
First, despite the FERC’s groundbreaking shift from documents to data for its most important regulatory filings, most energy regulatory information is still exchanged by way of PDFs. HData is ingesting this whole corpus into the platform, adding digital structure wherever we can and attacking the mess with our Regulatory AI where we can’t.
Second, when properly grounded in the content, our Regulatory AI is already providing accuracy and reliability, but we have much bigger plans for it. Imagine being able to direct an entire research project, sourcing numbers and files from wherever they live, and combining the sources to create a complete answer, all without ever copying or pasting anything. Your imagination falls short of what Regulatory AI can do - once we weave it into our solutions.
Third, we have to do all this very fast while building our network of customers and partners from zero to the largest in the industry.
For all three of these reasons, we are celebrating today, and yet already turning back to the work.
I’m grateful to welcome all our participants in this series A Round: Victorum Capital, Hyde Park Venture Partners, Firebrand Ventures, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, Start Something Ventures, St. Augustine Partners, Techstars, Ascent Energy Ventures, Frontier Ventures, BarronKent, BlueTree Capital, Southwire Technology Ventures, Jemison Investment Company, Mitz Banarjee, Tony Mealey, and John Hanger. Thank you.
I’m honored to welcome four new members to our Board of Directors and two new members to our Board of Advisors: directors and observers Allison Myers, Amy Francetic, Anirudh Kapuria, and Matt Wilson; advisors Donna Ward and Frank Lacey.
LET’S GOOOO!
Hudson Hollister
Co-Founder and CEO, HData