About Magnefy
Built by the engineers who took the midnight calls
We started Magnefy because we had spent years working in grid operations and watching transformer failures that were not surprises. The physical signal was there weeks earlier. Nobody was reading it.
Our Mission
Advance notice instead of aftermath
Magnefy's purpose is straightforward: give utility operators and industrial facilities the advance notice they need to plan transformer maintenance rather than react to failures. Not a dashboard that tells you what broke after it broke. Not a temperature alarm that fires when the fault is already hours from tripping. A genuine early-warning system that reads the electromagnetic signal a failing transformer produces weeks before the event, translates that signal into a structured maintenance forecast, and delivers it to whoever needs to act on it.
The transformer reliability problem is not a data volume problem. Utilities have plenty of data. The gap has been in reading the right physical signal at the right point in the fault progression. That is the specific gap we exist to close.
Founding Story
Started in Pittsburgh, 2024
Grace Chen and Marcus Webb came to Magnefy from years in grid operations and relay protection engineering. The pattern they kept seeing in the field was consistent: transformers failed, post-incident analysis found the fault had been developing for weeks, and the signal had been there the whole time in the electromagnetic output of the asset. It just was not being captured or interpreted.
They started Magnefy in Pittsburgh in 2024 to build the system that would read it. Pittsburgh was not an arbitrary choice. The city has a concentration of utility and industrial infrastructure, a strong technical talent pool with roots in engineering and materials science, and a set of early-access operators who were willing to put sensors on real assets and evaluate the results honestly.
Magnefy is angel-backed by engineering-focused investors who have backgrounds in grid infrastructure and industrial operations. The company is in its early stage, running pilot programs with utility and industrial operators that began in 2025. We share pilot results honestly, including limitations, because that is the only way to build the kind of trust that a safety-critical application requires.
Grace Chen, CEO and Co-founder
The Team
Grid engineers and signal scientists
Grace Chen
CEO, Co-founder
Former grid operations engineer with background in distribution system reliability and transformer asset management. Focused on the translation between physical fault mechanism and operational response.
Marcus Webb
CTO, Co-founder
Relay protection and power systems engineer with experience in high-frequency signal capture and substation automation. Designed Magnefy's EM signature acquisition hardware and the DSP pipeline that processes it.
Nadia Osei
Head of Data Science
Signal processing and anomaly detection background. Responsible for the fault signature library and the pattern-recognition models that classify EM anomalies against known fault precursor signatures.
Location
Pittsburgh, PA
Pittsburgh's grid engineering heritage and concentration of utility infrastructure make it the right base for a company building at the intersection of power systems and signal science.
Magnefy, Inc.301 Grant Street, Suite 4300
Pittsburgh, PA 15222
+1 (412) 553-1860
[email protected]
Work with the engineering team
Questions about the technology, the pilot program, or partnering with Magnefy. Reach the team directly.