Energy management startup PADO has raised $6 million in its seed round.

The round was led by venture capital firm NovaWave Capital.

PADO provides an AI-powered energy orchestration Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform to optimize power usage across a data center’s white and gray space.

The startup said that it would use the money raised to accelerate its penetration within the mid-market colocation segment of the data center sector.

"In the US alone, over 5,000 data centers are trapped by worst-case design assumptions, often utilizing only half of their available power,” PADO’s CEO, Wannie Park, told DCD. “This leaves massive amounts of compute stranded. PADO bridges the gap between facility infrastructure and IT workloads, allowing operators to immediately unlock 30-60 percent more capacity within their existing footprint—without waiting years for grid upgrades.”

PADO SaaS platform works by continually analyzing the daily power consumption patterns of a data center’s IT and cooling infrastructure, identifying where operators can rebalance workloads across racks, migrate jobs to the cloud, or delay non-essential compute.

According to the startup’s website, the system can also inform users on how best to optimize power usage in their HVAC infrastructure. The firm claims that this approach enables operators to make savings by harnessing previously untapped power capacity in their data centers, without compromising the uptime of IT or HVAC equipment.

Founded last year with $4 million in capital, PADO is a spinout of the South Korean multinational LG Electronics.

In January, the startup announced a partnership with Vessl to integrate its SaaS platform with Vessl’s machine learning operations (MLOps) system. That followed a collaboration announced in May 2025 between PADO and energy technology firm MARA to develop new power load-balancing software for data centers.