There is a quiet moment happening at the edge of the grid, and it is not quiet because nothing is happening. It is quiet because the signal finally got clean. Sense, the Cambridge, Massachusetts grid edge intelligence company founded in 2013 by Mike Phillips, Ryan Houlette, and Christopher Micali, has spent more than a decade teaching electricity to talk back. Not marketing talk. Electrical truth. Waveforms. Signatures. The kind of data that does not blink.
On January 27, 2026, Analog Devices made a strategic investment in Sense. Amount undisclosed. Intent unmistakable. Analog Devices does not chase novelty. It backs infrastructure when the math works and the physics agree. This is a semiconductor giant betting that intelligence belongs where the electrons move, not three clouds away asking for permission. Sense lives there already, embedded directly inside smart meters, reading millions of samples per second and turning raw current into usable insight.
The founders did not come from energy theater. Mike Phillips, Ryan Houlette, and Christopher Micali cut their teeth building voice recognition systems that shipped to hundreds of millions of devices long before assistants had personalities. They learned how machines listen. Sense applies that same discipline to electricity, identifying an average of 30 devices per home in real time, without smart appliances, without guesswork, and without leaning on the cloud as a crutch.
Today, Sense software is embedded in roughly 3.7 to 3.9 million smart meters across North America. Over 100,000 homes touched directly. Utilities seeing 30 times higher engagement than traditional portals. Customers averaging 8 percent annual energy savings. Demand savings hitting three times standard behavioral programs. This is not awareness. This is behavior change driven by clarity.
Analog Devices brings more than capital. It brings silicon, systems thinking, and a global utility footprint. Together, the companies are pushing grid edge processing forward, pairing Sense machine learning with high performance data conversion where it actually matters. The collaboration builds on recent 1MHz sampling deployments with Landis+Gyr, giving utilities substation level visibility at the meter. Sense in the streets. Analog in the bones.
Sense made another move that matters. In late 2025, the company exited the direct to consumer hardware business to go all in on utility embedded software. Fewer boxes. More intelligence. Chief Operating Officer Karen Rubin has been scaling that focus, while George Zavaliagkos leads a technology team built for edge constraints, not cloud fantasies. This is a company choosing leverage over noise.
