Nevada fund invests $100K in ‘profound’ AI platform for energy projects
Developing and financing large-scale energy projects can be complex, fragmented and inefficient — but BuildQ aims to fix that, and with the help of FundNV it can continue to do so.
BuildQ, an AI-powered platform designed to help streamline the development of energy projects, received the first $100,000 investment from FundNV, a for-profit, pre-seed venture capital fund. This is the second round of funding for FundNV, which will invest another $100,000 into 20 Nevada companies over the next 32 to 48 months.
Maryssa Barron, BuildQ’s founder and CEO, saw firsthand the long process of energy infrastructure development working in the renewable energy sector after she graduated from Harvard University. She started as a broker and adviser for brands such as Starbucks and Microsoft.
During the development process, there are thousands of legal, financial and engineering documents, and reviewing each one is time consuming and often confusing. So, after four years as a broker, she went on to law school at Stanford University and began working as an operator at a solar energy company — all while developing BuildQ.
“We’re really focused on tackling what I experienced in the industry around developing these projects,” said Barron. “These processes developing and financing a large scale energy infrastructure project is complex, it’s fragmented and inefficient.”
Barron was hiring her team while studying for the bar exam, which she does not recommend, and BuildQ launched in April 2024 and then moved to Las Vegas in August.
“New geothermal projects are being developed in Northern Nevada. There’s a lot of data center capacity being built,” said Barron on why Nevada is a great fit for BuildQ. “You really can rise to that moment and do so in an ecosystem like Nevada, where all of these pieces are coming together within the state.”
How does BuildQ work?
There are thousands of pages of paperwork that goes into financing and developing an energy project, according to Barron, and reviewing each one in checking for accuracy or completeness is done manually, which is “rightfully slow.” Due to this, legal fees or financing processes can cost around $200,000 to $500,000 and project delays are very common.
“What AI is really good at is reading,” said Barron. “We’re using AI to automate due diligence, document management and financing workflows, to reduce those legal costs, transaction delays and inefficiencies in in those financing processes.”
With BuildQ, during these processes teams can use SharePoint or Google Drive and “with a few clicks of a button” integrate it into the BuildQ software, where it will synthesize the information. From there, BuildQ can make a checklist of items requested from investors, highlight important information in the documents and even identify local, state and federal regulations.
“It really is a profound solution, because, again, we’re dealing with thousands of documents,” said Barron. “Being able to synthesize and organize those with a click of a button, well, that’s a time saver, and it will ultimately reduce legal fees.”
Contact Emerson Drewes at edrewes@reviewjournal.com. Follow @EmersonDrewes on X.
