Ex-DOE Staffers Backed at $1bn Valuation With Modular Data Center Play

Three former US Department of Energy staffers have launched Mavria, a modular data center firm already valued at $1 billion, with $130 million raised to date across pre-seed and seed rounds.

Paradigm led the latest round. AMP PBC, Liquid 2, Critical Frontier and Dream Ventures also participated. The company is headquartered in The Woodlands, Texas, just north of Houston, and co-founders Adam Blake, Nick Poradek and Seth Cohen run it as CEO, engineer-founder and policy veteran respectively.

The first product, Terrain, is a factory-manufactured data center platform designed to replace custom field construction with repeatable manufacturing. It targets frontier AI labs, cloud providers and data center developers. Production is already under way in Houston.

Each Terrain unit is a 5MW system. It ships fully integrated from the factory, with power distribution networks, direct liquid cooling, automation controls and standardized IT server racks installed before delivery.

Can modular units escape the grid queue?

The company's central claim addresses the constraint that has stalled data center builds across the US market: interconnection. Mavria says each unit can plug directly into local distribution power lines and "soak up" excess capacity, bypassing grid delays that have plagued most data center construction.

That claim remains untested at scale. The company told the Wall Street Journal that testing of the Terrain units is slated for early 2027, with assembly lines expected to scale output by mid-2027. Until then, the grid-bypass proposition is vendor marketing, not commercial reality.

What does this change for operators and hyperscalers facing multi-year power queues? Potentially, a path to capacity measured in months rather than years — but only if the 5MW units deliver their rated throughput on distribution lines, and only after the 2027 test cycle validates the design.

A founding team assembled from energy, law and software

CEO Adam Blake framed the launch around the mix of backgrounds the company assembled. He said: "Building Mavria requires people from industries that have rarely worked together, but increasingly must."

Blake detailed his co-founders' credentials directly. He said: "Nick Poradek is an engineer who became a founder. He built complex energy equipment, sold his last company to Liberty Energy, and then helped build Liberty's manufacturing platform."

Of the third co-founder, Blake said: "Seth Cohen started as a Kirkland lawyer and ended up at the center of the effort to restart American nuclear power, working across government, industry, capital, and policy."

Blake's own record spans energy and software. He built one of the largest commercial solar companies in the US and sold a software business to Vista Equity Partners.

The bench extends beyond the three named founders. According to Blake, the wider founding team has run utilities, led a modular LNG manufacturer with more than a thousand employees, developed major energy projects, and rapidly scaled technology companies.

What comes next

Mavria is hiring across engineering, manufacturing and operations to support scaling. The immediate milestones are fixed: unit testing in early 2027, assembly-line output by mid-2027, and a Houston production line already running today.

The $1 billion valuation prices in execution that has not yet happened. If Terrain units pass grid-connection testing on schedule, Mavria becomes one of the first credible suppliers of factory-built 5MW capacity to a market where power availability, not land or capital, sets the pace of AI infrastructure buildout.