Heard Around The Grove
By Blake Newcomer • February 02, 2026
AI as the trojan horse for innovation in energy + cleantech is a well explored topic by now.
Well, it doesn't stop today!
This week on The Grove Climate Podcast we had Vik Chaudry, co-founder of Buzz Solutions. Not only is their story rich with lessons, but the technology they pioneer is extremely lowkey from the public's perspective.
The opportunity lies in the collection of infrastructure data. Utilities manage more assets than they ever have with no signs of slowing. PG&E alone now "processes ~50 million inspection images annually".
Traditional inspection methods are manual and can't keep up with demand. So, where do they turn to?
In this week's issue
- AI in utilities
- Building persistent startup culture,
- Unlocking grid capacity
Let's dive in!
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Featured Theme: Deploying AI Infrastructure Intelligence at Utility Scale
Utility AI deployment faces a critical challenge: everyone wants proven technology, but someone has to be first. The successful companies crack this code through superior product performance and strategic patience.
Vik recently celebrated eight years building from a Stanford research lab to enterprise utility deployments. Eight years to win with utilities. Buzz Solutions uses AI-powered computer vision to analyze drone and helicopter imagery of power lines, automatically detecting equipment failures, vegetation risks, and fire hazards before they cause outages.
From 2017 to 2019, the company operated in pure development mode. They built proprietary AI models while securing access to utility data that wasn't publicly available. Vik describes "taking a bet" that the utility market would reveal the need to more sophisticated damage control methods. In the late 2010s, it simply wasn't there.
This patience paid off in 2022 when New York Power Authority ran an "AI bake-off". This was a blind assessment of several companies in the space of AI image processing for asset management. Buzz returned results in seven minutes with 85% accuracy compared to the next-best performance of 32%. This could seem like just good marketing and easy to talk about now, but this technology had been in development for 5 years by that point. Talk about patience.
That first major RFP victory is the momentum they needed to enter the industry. As Chaudhry notes, "no one wants to be the first and second customers for a new technology, but everyone wants to be the fourth and the fifth."
More on Vik's story and where Buzz is now in The Grove's blog post about the episode.
This Week's Playbook: Trust Your Gut in Hiring
Chaudhry's hard-earned lesson: "Never underestimate the power of intuition and gut feeling" when evaluating cultural fit. Here's the framework that emerged from Buzz's hiring evolution:
Round 1: Technical Competency - Use structured challenges and domain-specific assessments to lay a foundation for technical competency,
Round 2: Cultural Chemistry - This is where intuition becomes critical. If something feels off about how a candidate interacts with your team or approaches problems, trust that instinct even if they check every technical box.
Round 3: Mission Alignment - In deep tech companies with long development cycles, hire people who are genuinely passionate about the sector and problem you're solving, not just the role or compensation.
These may seem obvious, but ensure that any major business partnership you enter into check these boxes.
The Inosculation
The utility sector represents a masterclass in patience and persistent execution. Chaudhry's eight-year journey from Stanford lab to enterprise deployments demonstrates that breakthrough technologies often require waiting for markets to mature for sooooo long.
My biggest question, and one I will ask Vik on our next episode, is what carried you through those years of uncertainty? How did you have the confidence that this was the direction utility asset management would go? So many of The Grove founders have navigated, or are navigating, the same chasm.
Many entrepreneurial stories follow a similar arc. Extreme belief (also see: delusion?) is a critical ingredient in the deep tech recipe. Some say it's "seeing the future", but that's easy to say after the bet has worked out. Every day there are thousands of founders sprinkling that same ingredient into their business and only a small few come out the other end in tact. What is truly the way to get there? How much shear luck? What else is involved and how much of it?
As The Grove continues to grow, we will arrive closer to answers for these timeless questions.
At the same time, I suspect they will always live in the horizon. Just out of reach. Only time will tell.
Resources
Annual conference by Smart Energy Initiative in Southeastern PA if you're around
More Grid news - this time about the cold weather hitting much of the US (including us here in Philly!)
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With love, Blake
See you next week!
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