Lucend, Formerly Coolgradient, Raises $3.3M to Bring Transparent AI to Data Centers to Increase Uptime and Reliability While Maximizing Efficiency

Lucend today announced that it is bringing its transparent data center optimization to the U.S. market, helping enterprises illuminate complex operational environments and empowering data center operators, innovation officers, and sustainability officers with the intelligence they need to act with trust, accuracy, and confidence.

Lucend’s Transparent AI platform connects to existing infrastructure, no new hardware required, to transform static systems into adaptive, self-learning environments. The software takes existing sensor data to see connections across 300 billion sensor readings. Lucend’s AI analyzes billions of data points daily and provides prescriptive recommendations. The intelligence that Lucend’s platform delivers “shows its work,” empowering operators and delivering verifiable impact across enterprise environments that demand both performance and trust.

“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 Were Optimized for Uptime, Not Efficiency

Lucend has been implementing its AI solution across dozens of data centers since 2023, spanning Melbourne, Singapore, Paris, London, Amsterdam and Chicago. Working with global data center operators like Digital Realty, Global Switch and T5, Lucend has collected data from different climates and designs, working with closed-loop systems, adiabatic cooling designs, cooling and electrical assets like chillers, IACs, UPSs and generators or data points like valve openings, fan speeds, temperature setpoints and pressures.

To-date, Lucend customers have achieved:

• ~40% reduction in power use effectiveness (PUE)
• ~25% reduction in power use
• ~30% reduction in water use
• ~40% improvement in team efficiency

“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.”

US Expansion Underway

More than half of all global data centers are located in the U.S., making it a key market for Lucend. With $3.3M in Seed funding, Lucend is scaling operations, sales, and customer support in the U.S. to help existing facilities operate more efficiently and extend infrastructure life. In September 2025, Coolgradient won the Model IT category at the Yotta 2025 Innovate Arena in Las Vegas.

Remarkable Ventures Climate (RVC) led Lucend’s seed round and was joined by Mitsubishi Electric Innovation Fund, New Climate Ventures, Avesta and Stepchange with support from their current investor, 4impact capital.

“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."

Mr. Aktihanoglu continued, “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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