Lucend, formerly known as Coolgradient, has closed a $3.3 million seed funding round to expand its Transparent AI platform into the U.S. market. The funding, led by Remarkable Ventures Climate (RVC) and supported by Mitsubishi Electric Innovation Fund, New Climate Ventures, Avesta, Stepchange, and 4impact capital, will accelerate sales, operations, and customer support to help U.S. data center operators improve efficiency, reliability, and resource conservation without new hardware or operational disruption.
Lucend’s platform transforms static data center systems into self-learning, adaptive environments by leveraging existing sensor data—no new hardware required. It processes 300 billion sensor readings to uncover hidden connections, then provides clear, explainable recommendations that operators can review and implement with confidence. This “show its work” transparency addresses trust barriers in AI adoption for mission-critical facilities.
“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.”
Data centers have historically been optimized for uptime rather than efficiency. Lucend’s deployments since 2023 demonstrate measurable gains across diverse climates and designs, including closed-loop systems, adiabatic cooling, and assets such as chillers, IACs, UPSs, generators, valve openings, fan speeds, temperature setpoints, and pressures.
“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.”
With more than half of global data centers located in the U.S., Lucend is prioritizing this market to extend infrastructure life and capture efficiency gains amid explosive AI compute growth. The company’s recent recognition—winning the Model IT category at Yotta 2025 Innovate Arena in Las Vegas—further validates its approach.
“Lucend is a category-defining company led by a world-class team. Jasper de Vries brings deep AI and product leadership and built an intuitive platform UI, with field results that outperform peers,” noted Murat Aktihanoglu, Managing Partner, Remarkable Ventures Climate (RVC). “René Gompel complements with decades of B2B software experience and prior entrepreneurial success. The team’s early insight into this market, years before the AI boom, has positioned them well ahead of competitors, many of whom are just now entering the space.”
“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.”
About Lucend
Lucend is a global technology company that delivers daily clarity for data center operations through Transparent AI. Formerly known as Coolgradient, Lucend turns existing data into clear, verifiable optimizations that empower operators to make smarter, faster, and more confident decisions while remaining in control. Proven across deployments in Europe, Lucend is now expanding into the U.S. to scale its impact across data center facilities.
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