$24M to bring chip cooling breakthrough closer to mass production

The growth of AI is hampered by computational power. Increasing demands for AI to become ever more powerful and ever more accessible have placed a requirement for there to be ever more powerful computer chips. However, increasingly powerful chips produce more heat, making cooling a key bottleneck.

Corintis closed a $24M Series A to address this problem. The round was led by BlueYard Capital with participation from Founderful, Acequia Capital, Celsius Industries, XTX Ventures, among others. Corintis also announces that it will be opening multiple US offices to better serve its American customers in addition to an Engineering office in Munich, Germany. 

To date, the company has raised $33.4M in total. As part of this funding, Chairman of Walden International and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has joined as a board director and investor prior to becoming Intel CEO, in addition to Geoff Lyon (former CEO & Founder of CoolIT), also joining the board. With this addition to the board, Corintis doubles down on building a bridge between the worlds of semiconductor design, manufacturing, and chip-cooling.   

Lip-Bu Tan added: “Cooling is one of the biggest challenges for next-generation chips. Corintis is fast becoming the industry leader in advanced semiconductor cooling solutions to address the thermal bottleneck, as made evident by its growing customer list.”

Corintis’s technology focuses on microfluidic cooling: Optimised micro-scale liquid cooling for computer chips in data centres, which are used for advanced computation, including for generative AI. Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that in collaboration with Corintis, it has successfully achieved a breakthrough by developing an in-chip microfluidic cooling system that can effectively cool a server running core services. Tests showed that microfluidic cooling embedded inside the chip removed heat a staggering three times better than the most advanced technology commonly used today. The article was shared by Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella on Linkedin. 

Based on research conducted at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, Corintis was co-founded by Dr Remco van Erp (CEO), Sam Harrison (COO) & Prof Elison Matioli (Scientific Adviser).

Remco van Erp, Co-Founder & CEO of Corintis, said: “Every chip is unique. It’s like a cityscape with hundreds of billions of transistors, connected by countless wires. Cooling today is not adapted to the chip, relying on simplistic designs where several parallel fins are carved into a block of copper with a blade. But just like in nature, the optimal design for each chip is a complex network of precisely shaped micro-scale channels that are adapted to the chip and guide coolant to the most critical regions. Finding the right design per chip to create increasingly better cooling systems under short timelines is a challenge that will only get harder.”

Corintis has already manufactured over ten thousand cooling systems, with deployments running in data centers on leading-edge AI chips. With new funding, the company looks to scale its team and ramp up its manufacturing footprint even further. With this scale, Corintis is ready to play a decisive role in the advancement of computational and AI power. At the beginning of September, Corintis ranked first in the Top 100 Swiss Startup Award.

(PR – SK)

On picture from left to right: Corintis founders: Sam Harrison and Remco van Erp.