Axross put an AI brain on the factory chiller plant - and cut the bill
The Singapore startup (YC W22) doesn't sell new air conditioners. It sells the software that makes the ones you already own up to 30% more efficient - while keeping cleanrooms exactly where they need to be.
Walk into a semiconductor fab or a pharmaceutical plant and the most expensive thing running is not the robots on the line. It is the air. Cleanrooms have to sit at an exact temperature and humidity around the clock, and the machinery that holds them there - chillers, air handlers, cooling towers, the whole HVAC apparatus - quietly eats a huge slice of the facility's power bill. Most operators treat that number as a fixed cost of doing business. Axross treats it as a software problem.
Founded in Singapore in 2021 and admitted to Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch, Axross builds an AI-driven control system that sits on top of a facility's existing HVAC and building-management setup. It reads the sensors, forecasts how much cooling the building is about to need, and adjusts the equipment before the heat load arrives - rather than reacting after the fact. The company's headline claim is straightforward: up to 30% less HVAC energy, without swapping out a single chiller.
01 / WHAT IT DOESCooling, but predicted instead of reacted-to
Traditional building controls are reactive. A thermostat notices the room is warm, then tells the system to work harder. That lag is expensive, and in a cleanroom it is also risky - overshoot the setpoint and you can scrap a batch. Axross reframes the job as forecasting. By learning from a facility's own historical and real-time data, its models predict cooling demand and pre-position the equipment, so the system spends less energy chasing conditions and more time holding them steady.
The product is best understood as four layers stacked on top of hardware a facility already owns:
02 / WHO USES ITThe buildings that can't afford to guess
Axross is aimed at the industrial customers with the least tolerance for environmental drift: pharmaceuticals, semiconductors and precision manufacturing. These are facilities where a fraction of a degree, or a few points of humidity, is the difference between a passing lot and a written-off one. They already spend heavily to keep conditions tight, which is exactly why a system that keeps them tight for less energy has an obvious buyer. The company operates from Singapore with engineering and operations hiring in Kuala Lumpur, keeping it close to Southeast Asia's manufacturing base.
The cheapest, greenest kilowatt-hour is the one you never spend. Axross goes looking for those wasted hours inside a system nobody was optimizing - the HVAC plant - and hands facilities the savings without asking them to buy new hardware.
03 / THE PROBLEMWhy HVAC is the hidden line item
In an energy-intensive facility, heating, ventilation and air conditioning can be one of the single largest consumers of electricity. It runs continuously, it is often oversized "to be safe," and it is rarely tuned once installed. That combination - big, always-on, and under-optimized - is what makes it such fertile ground. Every percentage point trimmed off HVAC flows straight to two places a modern manufacturer cares about: operating cost, and Scope 2 greenhouse-gas emissions, the ones tied to purchased electricity that increasingly show up in corporate climate reporting.
Figures reflect Axross's stated "up to 30%" savings claim and are illustrative, not a measured benchmark for any specific site.
04 / THE FOUNDERSAn econometrician and an aeronautics engineer walk into a plant room
Neither founder came up through HVAC, which is part of the story. CEO Yih Lin Teh describes herself as an econometrician turned climate-tech entrepreneur - a background in modeling systems and reading data, pointed at emissions. CTO David Chew holds an MEng in Aeronautical Engineering from Imperial College London and did stints at Accenture and Wood Mackenzie before founding companies. Their outsider angle is the tell: they approached air conditioning not as a mechanical-engineering discipline but as a forecasting and optimization problem, which is precisely where machine learning has an edge.
05 / HOW IT'S DIFFERENTSoftware layer, not a rip-and-replace
The building-controls world is crowded with large incumbents - the Johnson Controls and Carrier types who sell equipment, and newer AI-optimization players like BrainBox AI. Axross's positioning is deliberately narrow and software-first. It does not want to sell a facility new chillers. It integrates with the HVAC and BMS infrastructure already installed, which lowers the barrier to a "yes" - there is no capital project, no downtime to swap hardware, and the value shows up as a smaller electricity bill on equipment the customer already trusts. For a plant manager weighing a pitch, "keep everything, save up to 30%" is an easier conversation than "let us re-plumb your cooling system."
06 / THE MODEL & THE MARKETSelling savings in a region that's heating up
Axross sells business-to-business to industrial facility operators, tying its pitch to measurable outcomes: energy saved, emissions lowered, production environments stabilized. The team is small - roughly eight to ten people - and technical, weighted toward AI, data science and industrial systems. Its seed round, backed by Y Combinator and iSeed, closed in 2022. Third-party trackers estimate the company at around $1M in annual revenue and a low-single-digit-million valuation, though Axross has not confirmed those figures publicly, so read them as external guesses rather than gospel.
The bigger bet sits underneath all of it. Southeast Asia's factories are growing, power costs are climbing, and multinational customers are pushing emissions targets down their supply chains. Axross's wager is that regional industrial competitiveness will increasingly run through energy efficiency - and that the first, most-overlooked place to find it is the air handlers humming in the background of every plant.
Find a mission-critical, always-on system everyone books as fixed cost. Add sensors. Add a prediction model. Automate the controls. Price it against the savings. Axross ran that playbook on HVAC - the same shape works in plenty of other overlooked corners of heavy industry.
07 / WHERE IT FITSThe quiet end of the climate stack
Solar farms and battery gigafactories get the headlines. Axross lives at the less photogenic end of climate tech - efficiency - where the wins come from spending less rather than generating more. It is a company that grew out of an earlier venture, bipi, and followed the energy and the emissions to where they actually pool: inside the chiller plant. Whether it scales into the giants' territory or stays a focused regional specialist, the underlying pitch is durable. Industry has to decarbonize, cooling is a big part of the load, and the cheapest way to start is to stop wasting what you already pay for.