Rhizome wins Unitil contract for AI grid resilience planning

Rhizome's three-year deal with Unitil will deploy its gridADAPT and gridFIRM tools across New Hampshire and Massachusetts utility networks.

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Rhizome, the San Francisco-based AI grid-planning platform, has signed a three-year partnership with Unitil Corporation to model and prioritise resilience investments across the utility's electrical service areas in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The agreement, announced on 21 October 2026, will see Unitil deploy Rhizome's gridADAPT and gridFIRM tools on a single software instance to assess multi-hazard climate risks including wildfire and severe winter weather.

Unitil, established in 1984, serves 97 communities across Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, supplying electricity and natural gas to approximately 215,000 customers. New England's risk profile has shifted materially in recent years: New Hampshire alone recorded more than 504 wildfires since 2021 and broke a 130-year record for the driest summer in 2025. That exposure sits alongside annual snowfall exceeding 50 inches across much of the region, creating a compounding dual-hazard environment that legacy capital planning tools were not designed to address.

The platform

Rhizome, founded in 2023, combines AI, climate projections and historical utility asset data to model the probability and consequence of asset failure under future climate conditions. Its gridADAPT product links climate hazard projections with operational performance data to support forward-looking resilience planning; gridFIRM extends that capability specifically to long-term wildfire risk. Under the Unitil contract, the two tools will run on a shared instance, giving the utility a unified risk quantification layer across hazard types.

Rhizome co-founder and chief executive Mishal Thadani said the partnership represents "the first step in taking a uniform approach to risk quantification across all hazards, then improving resilience and investment planning to keep their customers' lights on and bills low." Sara Sankowich, Unitil's Vice President of Shared Services and Sustainability, said the work would help the company "make informed, cost-effective decisions that benefit our customers for years to come."

For Unitil, the commercial rationale is partly regulatory. Resilience capital spending faces growing scrutiny at state level in both New Hampshire and Massachusetts, where utilities must demonstrate cost-benefit justification before capex is approved. Rhizome's platform is positioned by the company as a way to produce defensible, evidence-backed analysis structured for capital planning and regulatory filings, an important distinction when resilience costs are ultimately recovered from ratepayers.

Market context

The Unitil deal extends Rhizome's New England footprint, which already includes Vermont Electric Power Company and Vermont Electric Cooperative. The company's broader customer list spans National Grid, Avangrid and Fortis across North America, Europe and Oceania. A partnership with National Grid covering wildfire resilience in Massachusetts, New York and the UK was announced in December 2025, and gridADAPT was deployed with Horizon Energy Network in New Zealand in March 2026.

The AI-powered grid-planning segment is attracting attention from both specialist startups and established utility software vendors as regulators and investors press utilities to quantify physical climate risk more rigorously. Frameworks such as the SEC's climate disclosure rules and equivalent UK and EU requirements are raising the bar for corporate climate risk reporting, which creates a second commercial driver for platforms like Rhizome alongside the operational resilience case. Utilities that can translate climate modelling into capital planning documentation structured for regulatory filings are better positioned to defend capex programmes before state public utility commissions, a process that has become more contested as energy affordability pressures intensify across the northeast United States.

Rhizome will look to convert its growing reference customer list into longer-term enterprise relationships as the platform matures beyond its 2023 founding. Investors and buyers will be watching for published risk-reduction benchmarks and evidence that the cost-benefit outputs hold up under regulatory scrutiny.

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