EPFL spin-off SmartHelio secures strategic investment from quantumEDGE

SmartHelio, a Lausanne-based spin-off of EPFL, has secured a strategic investment from quantumEDGE Ventures. The partnership will support the company’s expansion across global energy markets, with a particular focus on accelerating deployments in the Middle East and North Africa region.

SmartHelio develops what it calls Autonomous Energy Operations, an approach in which AI agents take an active role in monitoring, diagnosing and prioritizing actions across renewable energy portfolios. Earlier this year, the company launched GAIA, an AI agent purpose-built for energy infrastructure that helps customers automate up to 90 percent of daily monitoring and reporting activities while improving asset performance. Unlike generic AI copilots, SmartHelio combines physics-informed intelligence, energy-domain expertise and human oversight designed for critical infrastructure environments.

As solar, battery storage and distributed energy resources scale globally, operational complexity has become one of the industry’s central challenges, with operators managing growing volumes of data, larger asset portfolios and labor shortages. SmartHelio’s platform acts as an intelligent operational layer that allows teams to focus on higher-value decisions while reducing repetitive tasks.

The company today supports more than 8 GW of energy assets worldwide and works with utilities, independent power producers and enterprise energy owners across Europe, North America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East, including Shell, Dominion Energy, Tata Power, Verbund and Schneider Electric.