What if we could
rethink everything?
For over twenty years, we worked inside and alongside transmission system operators. We saw the same structural problem, again and again. So we decided to solve it.
Despite decades of technological progress, the core principles of substation control and protection have barely changed in fifty years. Systems became digital — but also more complex, and harder to maintain. The needs of grid operators are simple: reliable solutions, easy to maintain, and fully interoperable. But today, no solution truly delivers all of this.
— Pierre Guillaume, Co-creator of VIRTEONA problem
observed in the field.
Current substation control and protection systems are built on vertically integrated architectures where each function relies on its own dedicated proprietary hardware. This results in a large number of devices, complex engineering, and significant lifecycle costs.
The promise of the digital substation was to simplify all of this. In practice, many implementations added new layers of complexity without delivering the expected benefits — more tools, more vendor-specific configurations, more integration risk.
As power grids evolve with renewable integration, HVDC, and increasing real-time requirements, these limitations become structural. The industry needs a fundamental simplification — not another layer on top of the same architecture.
A conviction
born from a proof.
VIRTEON was not born from a research programme or a business plan. It was born from a real problem, at a real substation — and a conviction that the industry could do better with the right foundation.
The founding proof of concept, conducted at RTE's Campus Transfo in Jonage, demonstrated that protection and automation functions could run reliably on standard compute hardware, under IEC 61850, without depending on a single proprietary vendor.
This is not a concept. It is a working prototype — which means VIRTEON enters the industrialization phase with a concrete technical foundation, validated in a real-time environment, not just on paper.
The VIRTEON
architecture.
Three structural principles that define what we are building — and why it is fundamentally different.
Software-defined protection
Multiple protection and control functions operate as software applications on a small number of standardized computing units. Hardware no longer dictates function. A new algorithm is a software update, not a hardware replacement.
Open multi-vendor marketplace
Protection vendors deploy their algorithms as applications within a common certified environment. Operators choose the best solution for each function — without being locked into a single supplier's ecosystem.
Lifecycle-first design
The VIRTEON architecture is designed to evolve. Configuration, updates, and supervision are built into the platform. Lower engineering complexity means faster commissioning, easier maintenance, and significantly reduced total cost of ownership.
The opportunity
in numbers.
A large, underserved global market with a clear structural need for modernization.
VIRTEON is not just an evolution of existing systems. It is a structural change — comparable to what virtualization did to computing infrastructure — applied to the protection and control of critical electrical infrastructure.