Laki Power raises €6M Series A to guard Europe’s power grid
The NATO Innovation Fund's first Icelandic investment goes to a nine-person Reykjavik team whose devices draw 300 watts straight from live power lines to watch the grid.
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Reykjavik, Iceland
Laki Power, the Reykjavik company that powers grid surveillance straight from live high-voltage lines, has raised a €6M Series A led by the NATO Innovation Fund with Icelandic firm ReykVC – the alliance-backed fund’s first direct investment in Iceland.
Europe talks endlessly about protecting critical infrastructure, and our transmission grids still run largely blind between substations. This round is one of the more concrete answers we have seen this year. Below, I lay out the round, the hardware behind it, the market it sells into, and what it tells us about where defence capital is heading in Europe.
€6M, a NATO lead, and a first for Iceland
Laki Power announced a €6M Series A on 17 September 2026, led by the NATO Innovation Fund, the deep-tech venture fund backed by NATO member states, with participation from Reykjavik-based ReykVC (Tech Funding News, which broke the round). It is the NATO Innovation Fund’s first direct investment in Iceland – a country with no army, one national grid operator, and now a defence-adjacent cap table.
The money goes into scaling the company’s hardware and software for power infrastructure monitoring and expanding engineering and sales globally, per the announcement. NIF partner Dr. Sander Verbrugge put the thesis plainly: “You can use it to charge drones, fit advanced sensor systems on it and install advanced communication relay systems.”
The company had previously raised a $3M round led by Eyrir Vöxtur with Brunnur Ventures in August 2023 (Northstack), after earlier backing from Brunnur and Silfurberg in 2020 (Northstack). A decade of patient Icelandic capital, then an alliance-scale lead. That is the arc.
Nine people, 300 watts, four continents
Founded in 2015 by Óskar Valtýsson and Ósvaldur Knudsen, Laki Power builds PowerGRAB, a patented device that clamps onto live high-voltage transmission lines and harvests up to 300 watts directly from the line itself – the company says roughly 100 times more power than standard inductive systems (Tech Funding News, Sep 2026). That budget is enough to run cameras, weather sensors and satellite links in places where there is no grid connection for the equipment watching the grid, and no road for the technician changing batteries.
The same trick charges drones flying inspection routes along power corridors. First customer: Landsnet, Iceland’s national transmission operator, which has been using the stations to watch lines through weather that would ground any helicopter. Deployments now span four continents – Europe, North America, South America and Australia – run by a team of nine, eight of them in Iceland and one in England (Tech Funding News, Sep 2026).
Remember: this is a hardware company from a country of 400,000 people selling to transmission operators on four continents before its Series A. We spend a lot of time asking where Europe’s deep-tech density will come from. Some of it is already hanging off a power line outside Reykjavik.
A $5.8bn market the energy transition keeps stretching
The segment Laki Power sells into is sizeable and compounding: power grid monitoring systems were worth $5.8bn in 2025 and are projected to reach $12.4bn by 2034, an 8.8% CAGR (DataIntelo, updated April 2026). Every renewable megawatt added at the edge of the network, every storm that takes down a line, and every sabotage headline pushes transmission operators toward real-time visibility.
Set the round against our own records and the scale reads sensibly. Energy software plays are raising bigger tickets – Nomos took a €20M Series A led by Index Ventures just two days earlier for white-label energy retail. A €6M Series A for grid-edge hardware with paying utilities on four continents is a measured cheque in a market growing high single digits for a decade. In an 8.8% CAGR segment, the prize goes to whoever owns the installed base when the retrofit wave arrives.
Defence money is rediscovering the grid
So what does an alliance venture fund want with weather cameras? Resilience. Since the Baltic cable incidents and the drone sightings that closed European airports, the line between energy infrastructure and defence infrastructure has effectively disappeared. The NATO Innovation Fund backing a grid-monitoring company is the same pattern we saw when EnduroSat raised $205M to mass-produce satellites from Sofia: dual-use capital flowing to companies that were never pitched as defence startups.
The good news is that this widens the funnel for European hardware founders. A sensor company in Reykjavik, a satellite factory in Sofia – the capital now reaching them was not available on those terms three years ago. What we are watching for next: whether the alliance’s money starts showing up at seed, and whether Iceland’s small but persistent venture scene – the Brunnurs and Eyrirs that carried Laki Power for a decade – gets to lead more of these before the big funds arrive. Track the rounds as they land on our fundraising data hub.
Europe does not need to invent a defence-tech ecosystem from scratch. It needs to notice the infrastructure companies it already has, and fund them like they matter. Reykjavik just showed us how that looks. Let’s keep the current flowing!
