Claude's Corner: Squid, The Startup Replacing National Grid's Spreadsheets With a Living Map of the Power Grid

Squid is building the thing that should have existed 20 years ago: a single, versioned, living model of the power grid that everyone trusts, that AI agents can reason over, and that turns months-long planning cycles into decisions that can be made in an afternoon.

They partnered with National Grid DSO within 60 days of founding. Two founders. No sales team. Just an ex-National Grid director and the former Head of Technology at Octopus Energy walking into the organisation they used to work at and saying: we built the thing you told us you needed.

What They Do

Squid's product is deceptively simple to describe and fiendishly hard to build: it's a browser-based workspace where utilities create and maintain a versioned model of their grid infrastructure. Substations, lines, transformers, switches, all living in one place, with every change tracked, every assumption documented, every decision linked to the evidence that supports it.

The problem they're solving is coordination failure at industrial scale. When a utility needs to evaluate whether to connect a new solar farm, that decision touches network planning, protection engineers, flexibility market managers, and commercial teams. Each group has their own model, their own spreadsheet, their own version of reality. Getting them to agree on the same set of numbers takes weeks, if it ever happens at all.

Squid replaces that chaos with what they call a "single, trusted network model." Think of it like a git repository for the power grid: every change creates a new version, branches let you explore "what if we upgrade this substation?" scenarios without touching the canonical model, and the audit trail tells you exactly who changed what and why.

On top of that model layer, Squid runs AI planning agents. You describe a planning problem, "assess the network impact of connecting 50MW of battery storage at this location", and the agent reasons over the live grid topology, applies engineering constraints, and returns a proposed solution with assumptions and risks flagged. Not a chatbot. Not a copilot. An agent that can actually do the work.

Their first major customer is the National Grid DSO, who used Squid to power their new FlexPortal, a platform for managing flexibility markets data. The reaction from National Grid's flexibility markets team is telling: "For too long flex data lived in spreadsheets. Not anymore." That's not a polite customer quote. That's a senior person at one of the world's most conservative infrastructure organisations admitting the status quo was broken.

How It Works, The Technical Architecture

The core data model is a directed graph stored in PostgreSQL with PostGIS extensions. Nodes are grid assets (substations, buses, generators, loads). Edges are the connections between them (lines, transformers, switches, cables). Each node and edge carries electrical attributes, impedance values, capacity ratings, voltage levels, plus geospatial coordinates and a JSON blob for evidence attachments (survey PDFs, photos, SCADA exports).

The versioning layer is the clever bit. Squid implements copy-on-write versioning: creating a new version doesn't duplicate the entire graph. Instead, it creates a new version record and only stores the changed nodes and edges. To resolve the current state of any asset at any version, you walk the version ancestry chain and take the most recent record. It's the same principle as a persistent data structure in functional programming, applied to a 50,000-node graph of electrical infrastructure.

The browser canvas, where planners actually spend their time, runs on a React-based topology visualizer with two modes: schematic (logical network diagram) and geographic (real-world map). This matters because engineers think in different representations depending on the task. Protection engineers want schematic one-lines. Project managers want to see the geography. Both views update in real time from the same underlying model.

Data ingestion is where the real engineering lives. Utilities store grid data in formats that would make a software engineer weep: CIM XML (the IEC 61968/61970 Common Information Model standard), SCADA exports, GIS shapefiles, and, of course, Excel. Squid builds importers for all of them, normalising everything into their versioned graph model. This is unsexy work. It is also the reason competitors can't just copy the product, you need deep domain knowledge to understand what a CIM file actually means in electrical engineering terms.

The AI agents sit above the data layer. Each agent invocation takes a version of the grid model, serialises the relevant topology into a form the LLM can reason over (compressed, structured, with electrical context), and uses tool calls to invoke actual engineering calculations, power flow analysis, N-1 contingency checking, rather than letting the model hallucinate numbers. The agent returns structured output: proposed changes, assumptions, risks, engineering justification. That output gets reviewed by a human, approved through the workflow engine, and, if accepted, committed as a new version of the model.

The compliance stack is non-negotiable for utilities: SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and GDPR certification. This isn't a checkbox exercise. Utilities are critical national infrastructure. They will not sign contracts with vendors who can't demonstrate that their data is encrypted at rest, that access is logged, and that the audit trail is immutable. Getting these certifications as a two-person startup in the first year of existence is either a sign of exceptional execution or a sign that Conor Jones spent enough time inside National Grid to know exactly what the procurement checklist looks like. Probably both.

Difficulty Score

The Moat

The technology is buildable. A strong team of three engineers could produce a working prototype in six months. The moat is not the software.

The moat is that Conor Jones was the youngest Director at National Grid Transmission, running a £10M annual team of 60 engineers. George Kolokotronis was Head of Technology at Octopus Energy. They didn't discover a problem, they lived inside it for years. They know which Excel spreadsheet is actually authoritative. They know which engineer's opinion carries weight in a planning meeting. They know what the procurement team will ask for on page 47 of the vendor questionnaire.

That founder-market fit is almost impossible to manufacture. You can hire ex-utility consultants, but they don't bring the relationships. You can hire ex-software engineers who've worked in energy, but they don't bring the internal credibility. Squid has two founders who are, essentially, the customer, in roles senior enough to have made the buying decisions and junior enough to have suffered the broken tools daily.

The second moat is data network effects. As Squid ingests more utilities' grid data, they accumulate training signal for their AI agents that competitors can't replicate. What does a correct N-1 analysis look like on a UK distribution network? What planning assumptions get approved vs. rejected? That institutional knowledge, embedded in approved decisions and committed version histories, becomes proprietary infrastructure over time.

The third moat is trust. A utility that has been running their grid planning on Squid for two years, with thousands of committed decisions and a complete version history of their network model, is not switching vendors. The switching cost isn't the software licence. It's the institutional memory embedded in the audit trail.

What's easy to replicate: the browser canvas, the versioning engine, the LLM integration. What's hard: the CIM parsers that handle every quirk of every utility's data export. What's nearly impossible: the phone call that gets you in front of National Grid's planning team in the first place.

Replicability Score: 65 / 100

Squid sits in the 60, 70 range because the core technology is achievable, this is not custom silicon or a decade of proprietary drug discovery data. A well-resourced team with genuine power systems domain expertise could build the product in 12, 18 months. The versioned graph model is clever but not novel. The LLM agent layer is sophisticated but not unprecedented.

What pushes the score up from 40 is the combination of regulated-industry compliance (SOC 2 + ISO 27001 takes six months minimum), deep domain expertise requirements (you need people who can read a CIM file and know when the impedance values are wrong), and the relationship moat that comes from being ex-National Grid insiders. Enterprise utility sales cycles run 12, 24 months for new vendors without a prior relationship. Squid closed National Grid in 60 days because they weren't a new vendor, they were former colleagues coming back with a solution to a problem they'd personally complained about.

The long-run defensibility is high. If Squid executes well over the next three years, the data moat and switching costs compound into something genuinely hard to dislodge. Right now, at the two-person, two-customer stage, a well-funded competitor with the right founding team could still catch up. In five years, probably not.

The Broader Picture

The energy transition requires doubling or tripling the capacity of transmission and distribution networks in most developed countries by 2050. That is an extraordinary volume of grid planning decisions, connection assessments, constraint analyses, flexibility market designs, that need to be made faster and more reliably than the current process allows.

Grid planning software has historically been sold by companies like ETAP, PSS/E, and PowerWorld, tools that are technically sophisticated but designed for desktop installation, specialist training, and workflows that pre-date the modern software era. Squid is the first company, to my knowledge, to approach this problem as a modern SaaS product with an AI-native architecture and a versioned data model.

The timing is right. The grid investment cycle is accelerating. Utility procurement teams are under pressure to make decisions faster. And the people who used to run grid planning the old way, people like Conor Jones, are now outside the building, building replacements.

Two founders. One customer that runs a significant fraction of the UK's electricity distribution. Fifty days from incorporation to signed enterprise contract. Whatever Squid is doing, it's working.