Dutch startup, Lucend, formerly known as Coolgradient, announced that it has successfully raised $3.3 million in seed funding led by Remarkable Ventures Climate (RVC) and joined by Mitsubishi Electric Innovation Fund, New Climate Ventures, Avesta, Stepchange, and existing investor 4impact capital.
With more than half of global data centers located in the U.S., Lucend will utilize the funding to scale its operations and customer support to meet rising demand in America.
With demand for AI‑ready capacity surging, Lucend is introducing a new standard of operational intelligence—one built on transparency, verifiability, and measurable efficiency gains.
Lucend’s Transparent AI platform connects to existing infrastructure, no new hardware required, to transform static systems into adaptive, self-learning environments. The software takes existing sensor data to see connections across 300 billion sensor readings. Lucend’s AI analyzes billions of data points daily and provides prescriptive recommendations. The intelligence that Lucend’s platform delivers “shows its work,” empowering operators and delivering verifiable impact across enterprise environments that demand both performance and trust.
“Lucend’s Transparent AI platform analyzes billions of data points daily and provides prescriptive recommendations that data center operators can review and choose whether or not to implement,” said Jasper de Vries, co-founder of Lucend. “Lucend’s human-in-the-loop approach removes risk by ensuring human oversight as operators develop trust in our recommendations that increases efficiency and reliability, and enables new approaches to maintenance and replacement decisions.”
Lucend has been implementing its AI solution across dozens of data centers since 2023, spanning Melbourne, Singapore, Paris, London, Amsterdam and Chicago. Working with global data center operators like Digital Realty, Global Switch and T5, Lucend has collected data from different climates and designs, working with closed-loop systems, adiabatic cooling designs, cooling and electrical assets like chillers, IACs, UPSs and generators or data points like valve openings, fan speeds, temperature setpoints and pressures.
To-date, Lucend customers have achieved:
- ~40% reduction in power use effectiveness (PUE)
- ~25% reduction in power use
- ~30% reduction in water use
- ~40% improvement in team efficiency
“As AI’s demand for data centers grows, data center operators need to prioritize efficiency and uptime while also conserving resources like energy and water,” said René Gompel, co-founder, “Lucend and our Transparent AI platform open a pathway to consistent, measurable efficiency improvements while increasing uptime, without new CapEx, and without disrupting existing operations, while saving some of our customers millions in annual operating cost.”
Komi Matsubara, Executive Officer (Vice President, Business Innovation), Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, said, “Lucend has strong competitiveness in AI-driven data center optimization technologies, and we expect its solutions to significantly improve data center operational efficiency and reduce costs. By combining our hardware and infrastructure control technologies with Lucend’s AI platform, we aim to deliver greater value to our customers and strengthen our competitiveness in the data center business.”
Murat Aktihanoglu, Managing Partner, Remarkable Ventures Climate (RVC) said, “Energy availability is critical to the transformation of power transmission for data center operators, cloud providers, and large enterprises. Lucend offers an immediate solution to capture the massive opportunity in the U.S., and we are excited to work with the team to accelerate the company’s growth in 2026 and beyond.”
