Skygrid Engineering has closed a pre-seed round backed by Automotive Ventures (Mobility Fund II) and WakeUp Capital (Fund I). The investment supports the continued development of SkyOS, our distributed operating layer for the accelerated edge that turns idle vehicle compute into an AI compute network — without new data centers, new grid capacity, or new silicon.
Why we're building SkyOS
Artificial intelligence has become a workload that outruns the infrastructure built for it. Data center power demand is doubling by the end of the decade. Grid interconnect queues are measured in years. The same period will see tens of millions of electric vehicles ship with high-performance compute that rivals modern workstations — and that compute will spend roughly 95% of its life parked, doing nothing.
Our thesis is simple: the data center of the next decade is battery-powered and sits in driveways and parking lots. The work is to unlock it in a way that is safe for the vehicle, profitable for its owner, and performant and reliable for the end user.
Who's backing us
Automotive Ventures invested out of their Mobility Fund II. In their own words, "Skygrid is building the orchestration layer that can unlock this latent capacity and turn it into a new class of AI infrastructure." The fund is led by Steve Greenfield, a long-time automotive industry veteran; Automotive Ventures backs founders "developing infrastructure, tools, and platforms shaping the future of mobility."
WakeUp Capital, Ireland's leading early-stage climate and impact fund, sees Skygrid as technology that "turns idle EVs into virtual data centres, delivering affordable, low-carbon, demand-shifted AI compute through existing assets."
Angel investors participated alongside the institutional leads.
The team
Skygrid was founded by Ronnie Jansson (CEO; previously Head of AI, Volvo Cars) and Leonard Aukea (CTO; previously Head of Machine Learning Engineering and Operations, Volvo Cars). The founding engineering team combines decades of automotive software systems experience and central AI-platform work at Automaker scale.
Sources
- Automotive Ventures, Why We Invested: Skygrid. February 2026. automotiveventures.com/blog/why-we-invested-skygrid
- WakeUp Capital, Fund I portfolio — Skygrid. wakeupcapital.com
- Skygrid looks to transform vehicles into AI compute nodes. CBT News, February 2026. cbtnews.com/skygrid-looks-to-transform-vehicles-into-ai-compute-nodes