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Case Study · B2B SaaS · Utilities · Pasadena, CA

GridModel

An MVP of an enterprise data platform for the electric-utility industry — built to meet strict security, compliance and reliability requirements, and delivered pilot-ready for a utility customer.

  • Started January 2026
  • Team of 10
  • 0 budget deviation
  • Pilot-ready MVP
← Power & Utilities expertise

01 / The Challenge

Built for
utilities

This page is about how the product was built. The hard part wasn't writing code — it was writing code that a regulated electric utility can actually run.

Regulated
industry

Electric utilities live under CEII and NERC CIP. The platform deploys on-prem, and customer data never leaves the customer's perimeter.

Enterprise-grade
security

Enterprise SSO, fine-grained role-based access control, and an immutable audit trail for every action. AI capabilities are strictly read-only by design.

Reliability
at city scale

City-scale data volumes, three isolated environments (dev · stage · prod), and a hard target: an MVP ready for a pilot with a real utility customer.

02 / Team & Process

Ten people,
one cadence

10team members
12client demos / review calls
4demos to the client's own customers
3environments: dev · stage · prod

Composition

  • 1 PM / lead · 1 systems analyst & docs
  • 2 backend · 2 frontend · 1 UX/UI designer
  • 1 DevOps · 2 QA

Cadence

  • Daily syncs and weekly groomings
  • Sprint retrospectives and 1-on-1s
  • Every meeting logged in Notion

Delivery

  • Schedule slip: ~1 month
  • Budget deviation: 0 — on budget
  • Pilot-ready at MVP cut

03 / Technology

10 micro-
services

TypeScript across the board — NestJS 11 on the backend (gate, core, user, ws, etl, logging, notification, admin, commander, web), React on the front.

  • DataPostgreSQL (Prisma 7) · ClickHouse · Redis · Kafka + Schema Registry · BullMQ · S3 / MinIO
  • Realtime & authSocket.IO / WebSockets · JWT / Passport / OIDC · Zod · Swagger
  • AIMCP SDK · Anthropic / OpenAI / Ollama · on-prem RAG (sentence-transformers + LanceDB / pgvector)
  • FrontendReact · Redux · high-performance WebGL rendering · Vitest
  • InfraDocker · Kubernetes (EKS) · Helm · ArgoCD · Terraform · Vault · Grafana / Prometheus · CI/CD with security gates and SBOM

04 / The Scale

By the numbers

1,067Jira issues
69epics
23feature areas · 48 specs
7user journeys
1,176backend unit test cases
131bugs filed & hunted down
85test-case documents
18role-based test scenarios
699documentation files
57design tasks
~63,900components across 3 city-scale test models
129substations · LA-Central, Austin (5 utility zones), validation

05 / Outcome

On budget. Pilot-ready.

From a blank repo in January 2026 to a pilot-ready enterprise platform: 10 microservices, a demanding real-time front end, 699 documents of engineering rigor — delivered with ~1 month of slip and zero budget deviation.

"Good idea without a good implementation team is like a seed that never sprouts. The team walked us through the process of developing a web platform, learned our user stories, and laid out preliminary architectural design."

Alex Tronkin — CEO, Co-Founder
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