tem hires Square's founding data scientist to open energy OS
tem, the London-based energy transactions scaleup, has appointed Berian James as General Manager of Rosso, its energy transaction infrastructure platform. James arrives with a resume that traces the arc of modern data infrastructure: founding data scientist at Square in San Francisco, AI and data science lead at Maersk across global shipping, and machine learning infrastructure builder at Copenhagen Energy Trading. His immediate mandate is to open Rosso to third parties, letting any business price energy and run operations through an API or white-label product rather than building proprietary systems from scratch.
The hire is the most visible signal yet that tem is shifting from operator to infrastructure provider, the fintech-style "picks and shovels" move that Square itself eventually made when it evolved from a card reader into a developer platform.
From energy operator to energy infrastructure layer
Rosso was built to solve what tem describes as one of the hardest computational problems in the sector: forecasting electricity demand across settlement periods years into the future, then continuously pricing that against wholesale markets, network costs, regulatory requirements and counterparty risk. The platform is structured in two layers. Rosso Intelligence uses deep learning to forecast, optimise and price transactions across a portfolio of generators and businesses, routing around the intermediary web that typically sits atop the wholesale market. Rosso OS handles billing, metering, service and payments through automated agents, with tem claiming a headcount reduction of roughly 20 times versus a traditional utility back office.
The numbers tem is prepared to put on record carry weight: more than 6TWh of energy transactions facilitated, across 8,000-plus sites; over $80m in transaction fees returned to customers, a figure the company says has grown more than 200% in the past year; and a team that has more than doubled in 2026, backed by a $75m Series B led by Lightspeed, with Atomico, AlbionVC, the Branson family office, Hitachi Ventures and Schroders Capital also on the cap table.
James flagged the systemic gap his appointment is meant to address: "Energy has an outsized effect on every economy on earth, and it has not had anything like the attention it deserves from the world's best technology companies. Advancements in AI and ML mean we have a unique opportunity to redesign these systems and put power back into the hands of business owners."
The convergence read-across: fintech infrastructure logic meets the electron economy
The strategic logic here is more legible to a fintech investor than to a traditional energy analyst. Rosso is, in effect, positioning as the Stripe of energy settlement: a developer-friendly infrastructure layer that collapses the cost and complexity of building a regulated, real-time trading operation. James's Square pedigree is not incidental. Square demonstrated that commoditising payments infrastructure unlocks a long tail of merchants who could never have built their own acquiring stack. tem is making an analogous bet: that commoditising energy pricing infrastructure unlocks a new category of neo-utilities and corporate energy buyers who currently depend on legacy brokers and manual trading desks.
For cross-sector capital allocators, the timing is pointed. The energy transition is generating enormous complexity in wholesale markets, more variable renewable generation, shorter settlement windows, distributed storage, precisely the conditions that make legacy spreadsheet-and-trading-desk infrastructure untenable and machine-learning-native platforms structurally advantageous. Lightspeed's willingness to lead a $75m round signals that top-tier venture is now treating energy transaction infrastructure as a category comparable in scale and defensibility to fintech rails.
The next test for tem is whether the third-party platform model compounds as quickly as the company's own book has. Every new contract Rosso prices sharpens its forecasting model, a flywheel dynamic that James has navigated before, at Square, the more merchants transacted, the more accurate the risk models became, and the cheaper it became to underwrite the next merchant. If that dynamic holds in energy, Rosso's moat widens with every neo-utility that builds on it.