One of the first decisions we made at QXT was also one of the least visible to anyone using our products: we didn’t build our modeling core from scratch. We built it on Sienna, the open-source power systems modeling libraries developed through years of research in modern scientific computing.
That decision shapes almost everything downstream of it, so it’s worth explaining why we made it.
Rigor shouldn’t be reinvented
Grid modeling is a mature scientific discipline. The hard problems — representing power flow accurately, handling the scale of a real transmission network, keeping simulations numerically stable — have been worked on by researchers for decades. Starting from zero would have meant re-solving problems that a strong open-source foundation had already solved well, just to end up in roughly the same place, slower and with more bugs along the way.
Building on Sienna let us focus our engineering effort where it actually matters for the people using our products: making that rigor accessible, fast, and legible to someone who isn’t a power systems researcher.
Open architecture is a value, not just a technical choice
This connects to something we believe more broadly: that a field this important to the energy transition shouldn’t be a black box controlled by a handful of legacy vendors. Open foundations mean our modeling assumptions can be inspected, our results can be audited, and progress in the broader scientific computing community can flow back into what we build — instead of staying locked inside one company’s codebase.
What we built on top
Sienna gives us a scientifically rigorous, high-performance modeling core. What QXT adds is the layer that makes that core usable in the real world: infrastructure for live data, an interface designed for the people making decisions rather than the people running the simulations, and a product — Prescient — that turns all of it into operational awareness someone can actually act on in a workday, not a research cycle.
Complexity doesn’t disappear when you build on good foundations. It just stops being the thing your users have to manage themselves. That’s the bet we’re making, and it starts with not reinventing the parts that were never broken in the first place.
