Texture opens its US grid map to public edits and commercial use

Why it matters

Texture is making grid reference data commercially reusable while funding the registry itself. Its value will depend on whether contributors keep the records accurate enough for utilities, developers and researchers to rely on them.

Texture launched CommonGrid on September 25th, a public, editable registry that connects US utilities, grid operators, power plants, transmission lines, charging stations, rates and other energy data in one model. Co-founder and CEO Sanjiv Sanghavi is betting that the grid's basic reference data can be maintained as shared infrastructure rather than repeatedly assembled behind company walls.

Sanghavi brings a consumer-product background to the energy sector: before Texture, he co-founded ClassPass and later became chief product officer at energy company Arcadia. At Texture, he and co-founders Nicholas Brown and Victor Quinn have been building software for energy organizations working across utility data and grid operations. CommonGrid extends that work by making a layer of the data public, including to organizations that could build competing products on top of it.

Texture describes CommonGrid as a community-maintained registry and interactive map, built from hundreds of public sources. Its launch announcement says users can suggest edits, each accepted change carries an attribution and source, and revisions are timestamped and reversible. The project is moderated before changes are merged into hourly snapshots.

That correction model is central to the pitch. Grid information is spread across utility websites, government datasets, regulatory filings and operator databases, each with its own formats and update cycles. CommonGrid aims to connect those fragments so someone can move from a utility to its territory, programs, rates and nearby infrastructure without first reconciling separate spreadsheets and identifiers.

A public data layer with a commercial sponsor

The registry covers a wide range of entities. Texture says its initial model includes investor-owned utilities, cooperatives, municipal and federal power agencies; grid operators; power plants above 1 megawatt; transmission lines from 69 to 765 kilovolts; public EV charging stations; wholesale pricing nodes across seven grid operators; and programs such as rebates, demand response and tariffs. The company describes the scope in universal terms, but coverage will ultimately be tested record by record by the people who use and correct it.

CommonGrid is available through a searchable map and REST API. The launch release sets a limit of 60 API requests per hour without a key and 5,000 with a free key, and says weekly SQL and GeoJSON snapshots are available through the CommonGrid GitHub repository. Its data is released under the Open Database License 1.0, which allows commercial use and redistribution subject to attribution and sharing improvements to derived databases under the same terms.

That license makes the project useful beyond Texture's own customers. It also gives Texture a direct stake in making the registry work: the company says it created CommonGrid, funds its infrastructure and wants users to maintain it. If the data becomes a dependable base layer, Texture can build its own energy operations software on common records while developers, researchers and other vendors can use the same foundation. Sanghavi described the goal as replacing the slightly different private maps utilities and energy companies have built for themselves with a shared public record.

This is a different kind of product launch from a typical software feature. The immediate deliverable is data and the mechanism for changing it; the long-term bet is that contributors will keep it current. Texture says an elected moderation team reviews proposed edits, and identifies municipal utility boundaries as a priority for community corrections. Investor-owned and cooperative territories, the company says, are already in better shape. Who selects moderators and how review capacity grows will help determine whether the model can keep pace with the infrastructure it seeks to map.

The founder's bet on shared infrastructure

Sanghavi's earlier career gives the move a useful frame. At ClassPass, he worked on a consumer product that organized a fragmented market of fitness studios and classes; at Arcadia, he moved into energy software. The grid presents a different set of constraints, but the product problem Texture identifies is familiar: information may exist, yet remain difficult to find, compare and use consistently.

Texture has also raised capital to build its commercial platform. In May, it announced a $12.5 million Series A co-led by VoLo Earth Ventures and Equal Ventures, with Lerer Hippeau and Abstract Ventures participating. That financing was announced four months before CommonGrid's launch and is separate from it. The company is positioning the open registry alongside a business selling grid operations software, rather than presenting the data project as a standalone paid database.

The model leaves Texture with a practical incentive and a credibility test. The company benefits if CommonGrid lowers the cost of finding and connecting public grid information; users benefit if the data stays open, documented and correctable even when their work does not involve Texture's software. A registry that cannot keep up with utility programs, rates and asset changes would send users back to the fragmented sources it was built to consolidate. A registry that does keep up could save each new energy product team from rebuilding the same map before it can build anything on top of it.

CommonGrid's launch therefore puts Sanghavi's product thesis into public view: improve the shared foundation, then let different organizations build with it. The test is whether people close to the grid will contribute enough local knowledge to make a national model more useful than the private versions they already maintain.