Mavria raises $130 million to mass-produce modular data centers

Small modules could shorten yearslong grid-connection waits

Mavria was founded over the summer by Adam Blake, Nick Poradek and Seth Cohen, who met while working at President Trump’s Energy Department. The Texas startup raised $130 million in total funding and reached a $1 billion valuation as it prepared to mass-produce modular data centers. Its first unit is under construction at a Houston factory, with testing planned for early 2027 and production scale-up planned for midyear.

The founders brought different backgrounds into the venture. Blake founded commercial solar and software companies before entering the Energy Department through Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency’s recruitment of technology founders. Poradek and Cohen were political appointees at the Energy Department. Poradek co-founded an oil-field equipment manufacturing company that was sold to Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s Liberty Energy and served as a senior adviser to the secretary. Cohen, a lawyer, was chief counsel for nuclear policy at the Energy Department.

The team focused on nuclear power, including efforts to streamline regulations and build small modular reactors under a dormant Energy Department licensing program. Its work coincided with a broad DOGE campaign to rein in spending, staffing and grants at the department. The cofounders said they identified what Blake called a “strategic vulnerability” for the U.S.

“Our power infrastructure, manufacturing capacity and supply chains are nowhere near ready to meet the demand from AI,” Blake said. Mavria’s product is a standardized data-center system that the startup plans to produce in a factory and ship by truck.

The system is called Terrain, a modular 5-megawatt data-center system that includes power distribution, direct liquid cooling, controls and server racks. “Everything is modular. It is almost entirely built in factory and then you basically plug it in on site,” said Poradek. Mavria can sell the equipment, but it can also fully develop sites with electric power and operate them.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the units’ small size could allow them to soak up excess capacity on local distribution power lines and skirt the yearslong waits faced by data centers seeking grid connections. The units also could be added like Lego blocks to a larger location.

Alana Palmedo, managing partner at investment firm Paradigm, which has invested in Mavria, said the company’s advantage would be its ability to deliver quickly on a smaller scale than some of the supersize data centers under construction. “Local residents are predominantly responding to these large mega projects that they don’t want in their backyard,” said Palmedo, who described Mavria’s product as “not intrusive.”

The first Terrain unit is under construction at the Houston factory. Mavria has 35 employees and plans to begin testing in early 2027 before scaling up production by midyear. Other backers include investment firms Liquid 2 and Critical Frontier, along with AMP, a public-benefit corporation.

The launch comes as access to electric-power supplies and equipment has become one of the primary hurdles to building data centers. “The AI story is an infrastructure story,” said Anjney Midha, a founder of AMP and an early angel investor in Anthropic. Midha called Mavria’s modular approach a strategy for scaling infrastructure that many in the industry are beginning to adopt. “We have a pretty daunting challenge ahead to stay competitive with China,” Midha said.