Asoba

Market position

Asoba targets the gap between rapidly scaling distributed generation and the software managing it, citing 8,294 MW of behind-the-meter solar in South Africa, 19.3 GW of private generation registered with NERSA, 600 GW of solar installed globally in a single year, and more than $10 billion in annual global solar underperformance losses. It describes an open-protocol strategy intended to establish the data layer before proprietary standards consolidate, paired with published research as a trust-building discipline.

Asoba positions the open ODSE standard as avoiding vendor lock-in, stating integration of major OEMs in minutes versus 120–160 hours of per-vendor pipeline engineering, and allowing customers to switch vendors without rewriting analytics stacks. Detection is presented as physics- and behavior-based with financial impact attributed per inverter rather than threshold alerts, with claims of up to 97% fewer false alerts at equal fault-catch rate (described elsewhere as 57.8x false-alarm reduction). On the AI side, the company emphasizes governed execution — audit logging, mandatory safety phases and refusal to fabricate — against general-purpose LLM tooling, and cites 82.21% on FACTS Grounding for Nehanda.

Technology

Core technologies include the ODSE open schema with pre-built transforms for 11+ OEM formats in v0.5.0 (25+ inverter telemetry schemas cited for Nehanda CLI) plus physics and schema validation; JEPA-based per-inverter behavioral fault detection using continuous severity scoring rather than static thresholds; a System 1 / System 2 architecture for anomaly detection and loss quantification; transfer-learning forecasting models that start from a generic model and fine-tune to each site as telemetry accumulates; and Nehanda, a 27B model fine-tuned for RAG synthesis with zero-fabrication refusal. Nehanda CLI adds a deterministic six-phase SDLC state machine, safety checkers and air-gapped SQLite transcript logging for auditability. Integration is via REST API and Python/JavaScript SDKs.

Go-to-market

Self-serve adoption of the free open standard (pip install odse) and free tools such as the ROI estimator, Energy-at-Risk assessment and 24-hour forecast feed into demo requests for the paid Ona platform; developer distribution via SDKs, GitHub and Hugging Face; published whitepapers, case studies and research reports; and partnerships with organizations including AWS, NVIDIA, Climate Collective, Sustainable Energy Africa and LTM Energy.

Distributed energy asset owners and operators, O&M contractors, insurers, energy traders, investment and due-diligence teams, and developers building energy data tooling; case references include mining, industrial and infrastructure portfolios.

Geography

Headquartered in Cape Town per the company's about page, with a Techstars listing giving San Rafael, California and a funding report citing San Francisco and Cape Town. Active deployments span South Africa and Zimbabwe, with market focus on the SADC/SAPP region and research partnerships in the United States.

History

Founded in 2021. The company has published the ODSE open standard (v0.5.0 with 11+ OEM transforms) on GitHub and opendataschema.energy, released the Ona commercial platform, the Nehanda 27B model and Nehanda CLI, and the Zorora market-intelligence product, while building deployments in South Africa and Zimbabwe. A $100K seed round was reported in May 2026.

Risks & controversies

Performance, accuracy and savings figures — including forecast accuracy, false-alarm reduction, benchmark scores and customer case study outcomes — are self-reported by the company and not independently verified in the available material. Disclosed external funding is small ($100K seed) relative to the infrastructure scope described, and operations are concentrated in Southern African markets characterized on the company's own site as data-scarce and high-risk.