Pearl Street Technologies: A New Way to Optimize the Transmission Grid The modern, renewable energy-rich power grid is an increasingly complicated machine to model. Maybe technology born of the massively complicated world of designing computer chips can help. That’s the genesis of Pearl Street Technologies ’ approach to analyzing the complexities of power flows and planning parameters for the transmission grid. Its Suite of Unified Grid Analyses with Renewables (SUGAR) software platform can take minutes to find solutions to highly complex problems that can take traditional modeling methods weeks to derive—or, fail to derive at all. On Tuesday, the Pittsburgh-based startup raised an undisclosed pre-seed investment from Powerhouse Ventures, following an earlier investment Incite Ventures, the investment platform co-founded by Nest co-founder Matt Rogers . The new investment will add to$1.8 million in small business innovation research (SBIR) grants from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, as well as an award from DOE’s ARPA-E research program on grid optimization software.