Australia's new unicorn and its digital twins

This week on The Business of Tech, I talk to Neara co‑founder Jack Curtis about how a “physics-based digital twin” of electricity grids is changing the way we plan, build and protect electricity infrastructure – from Taranaki to Texas. 

Neara has just raised A$90 million in a Series D round led by US investment firm Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV), which also invested in Netflix, Spotify, Facebook and Xero. That takes total funding in Neara to about A$180 million, as some of the world’s most exposed utilities rush to digitise their networks in the face of extreme weather and the clean‑energy transition.

Neara’s origin story isn’t very corporate. Software engineer and Neara co-founder, Daniel Danilatos, hacked together a better power line design tool over a weekend for his wife, a line designer frustrated with clunky legacy software. The prototype spread “organically” in an industry notorious for moving slowly.

Within a few years, it had become the basis for a company now modelling around 90% of Australia’s electricity networks and working with most major utilities in Texas and California, and with a roster of New Zealand clients.

Predicting when things break

Most “digital twins” in utilities have been glorified 3D maps – pretty visualisations that don’t give asset owners enough confidence to make high‑stakes decisions. Neara instead builds behavioural models where every pole, line and substation is infused with real‑world physics: how it bends in a storm, heats up as load rises, or fails when gusts hit a certain speed. 

As Jack puts it, if you look at the pole outside your house in a gale, it should behave exactly the same way in Neara’s model – right up to the moment it snaps.

We also look at how physics‑based models help solve “good problems” like renewables congestion. Neara simulates how much extra power can safely be pushed through existing lines, where new wind or solar should connect, and how different mixes of generation and load will behave over 10–30 years. 

That’s crucial for countries like New Zealand, which sprinted to 80–90% renewable electricity without fully modelling system‑wide side‑effects such as dry‑year risk and fossil‑fuel fallback.

I found this chat fascinating and I’m sure you will too if you are interested in how evidence-based digital twins can transform industries. 

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