data-center-cooling
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Trane Technologies
The company behind Trane and Thermo King is turning a century of cooling know-how into an energy-management business for buildings, refrigerated fleets and AI data centers. Its wager is simple: the cheapest new energy is often the energy a machine stops wasting.
Seshu Madhavapeddy
Seshu Madhavapeddy is the co-founder and CEO of Frore Systems, the San Jose deep-tech company behind AirJet, the world's first solid-state active cooling chip, and the LiquidJet direct-to-chip line for data centers. A repeat entrepreneur with two prior exits and executive stints at Qualcomm, Samsung and Texas Instruments, he started Frore in 2018 with a simple frustration: the cooling fan hasn't fundamentally changed since the 19th century. In March 2026 the company raised a $143M Series D, crossing a $1.64B valuation as cooling became a defining constraint on AI performance.
Infinitum
Infinitum is an Austin, Texas company reinventing the electric motor. Founded in 2016 by Ben Schuler, it replaced the century-old iron-and-copper stator with a printed circuit board (PCB) stator, producing air core motors that are roughly 50% smaller and lighter, use 66% less copper, and consume about 10% less energy than conventional motors. Its Aircore EC motor system integrates a variable frequency drive and targets HVAC fans and pumps, data center cooling, industrial equipment, power generation and mobility. Backed by more than $385M in funding and partners such as Rockwell Automation, Infinitum was named to Fast Company's 2025 list of the World's 50 Most Innovative Companies, ranking No. 1 in energy.
Meriton
Meriton is an Irving, Texas-based national alliance of independent commercial HVAC manufacturer representatives. Founded in 2019 and led by Chairman & CEO Jerry Braun, it unites market-leading rep firms under a shared-services model - giving local businesses access to national scale, engineering depth, and corporate support in finance, HR, IT, safety, training, and marketing while letting them keep their names and local autonomy. Through more than two dozen acquisitions, Meriton now spans 19 operating brands, 44 locations, roughly 26 states, and 2,100+ employees serving manufacturers, contractors, engineers, and building owners across commercial, industrial, and institutional markets.
Jerry Braun
Jerry Braun is the Chairman and CEO of Meriton, a Dallas-based national alliance of commercial HVAC manufacturer representative firms that he has grown into a network of 19 member companies, 44 locations and more than 2,100 employees since 2019. He is also Chairman and CEO of Texas AirSystems, which he has led since 2000. Braun's model buys leading regional HVAC representative firms and keeps their local leadership in place while giving them national scale, a strategy that has multiplied Meriton's revenue and profit more than sixfold in five years.
etalytics
etalytics is a Darmstadt-based deep-tech company that builds AI software to make industrial energy systems more efficient and resilient. Its flagship platform, etaONE, pairs machine learning with physics-based model predictive control and digital twins to monitor, forecast, and autonomously optimize energy-intensive systems - especially HVAC and cooling - in data centers, automotive plants, and pharmaceutical and chemical production. Customers including Volkswagen, Equinix, Merck, and Digital Realty have reported cooling and ventilation energy reductions of up to 50%. Spun out of TU Darmstadt in 2020, the company raised a €16 million Series A backed by Microsoft's M12 fund and Alstin Capital.
Frore Systems
Frore Systems is a Silicon Valley thermal-technology company that builds AirJet, the world's first solid-state active cooling chip, and LiquidJet, a direct-liquid coldplate for AI data centers. Founded in 2018 by two former Qualcomm engineers, Frore uses ultrasonic membranes to move air at over 100 mph with no visible moving parts, letting thin fanless devices and dense AI servers run cooler, quieter, and faster. In March 2026 it raised a $143M Series D at a $1.64B valuation, positioning its 'Thermal Stack' as foundational infrastructure for the AI era.
P-1 AI
P-1 AI is a deep-tech startup building engineering AGI for the physical world. Its product, an anthropomorphized AI engineer agent named Archie, is trained on proprietary semi-synthetic, physics-based datasets to reason across multiphysics design problems and use the same complex engineering tools human engineers use. Currently operating at the level of a junior mechanical and electrical engineer, Archie is already working with design partners on data center cooling and critical power systems, with expansion planned into automotive, aerospace, and defense. Founded by former Airbus and United Technologies CTO Paul Eremenko alongside Google DeepMind and Airbus veterans, the company raised a $23M seed round in 2025 led by Radical Ventures.
Pascal
Pascal is a Cambridge, Massachusetts climate-tech company commercializing solid refrigerants to replace the greenhouse-gas coolants that make air conditioners, heat pumps, and refrigerators bad for the climate. Spun out of Harvard in 2023, Pascal builds cooling systems around barocaloric materials - wax-like layered solids that absorb and release heat when squeezed and released - working at pressures low enough to run on today's mass-market HVAC hardware. The company raised an $8M seed round in 2024 and aims to eliminate refrigerant emissions while cutting cost and boosting efficiency.
Maher Damak
Maher Damak is the CEO and co-founder of Infinite Cooling, an MIT spinout that recaptures the water vapor escaping from power-plant and industrial cooling towers using electric fields. A French-American mechanical engineer with a PhD from MIT and a degree from Ecole Polytechnique, he turned a fog-harvesting experiment in the Varanasi Research Group into a patented technology that recovers water more than 100 times purer than a plant's circulating supply. His work has earned Forbes 30 Under 30, the Lemelson-MIT prize, and an Edison gold medal, and his charged-mesh systems are now being tested on nuclear plants including EDF's Bugey site in France.
Phaidra
Phaidra is a Seattle-based industrial AI company that builds self-learning, reinforcement-learning control agents for the world's most complex mission-critical facilities - chief among them the data centers powering the AI boom. Founded in 2019 by alumni of Google DeepMind and the HVAC and defense industries, Phaidra's software plugs into existing building automation and SCADA systems without new hardware, learns a facility's behavior, and continuously adjusts cooling, power and workload setpoints to cut energy use while improving reliability. The company raised a $50M+ Series B in October 2025 led by Collaborative Fund with participation from NVIDIA, positioning itself to make 'AI factories' radically more resource-efficient.
Jim Gao
Jim Gao is the CEO and co-founder of Phaidra, a Seattle-based AI company building autonomous, self-learning control systems for the world's most complex industrial facilities, from data centers to vaccine plants. A mechanical engineer by training, he spent roughly a decade designing cooling systems for Google's data centers before teaching himself machine learning on nights and weekends. After AlphaGo, he launched DeepMind Energy, where reinforcement learning cut Google's data-center cooling energy by up to 40 percent. In 2019 he and two co-founders spun that idea into Phaidra, which by 2025 had raised over $120 million to make AI factories radically more efficient.
Vigilent
Vigilent is an Oakland, California company that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimize cooling in data centers, telecom facilities and other mission-critical buildings. Its software pairs wireless sensors with self-learning control algorithms to automatically match cooling output to real-time heat load, cutting cooling energy use by 40 percent or more while eliminating hot spots and reclaiming stranded capacity. Founded in 2008 by MIT-trained control engineer Cliff Federspiel, the company has deployed across 1,500-plus facilities in 36 countries and counts Verizon, NTT, Digital Realty, IBM and Telus among its customers.
Mark Housley
Mark Housley is the Chairman and CEO of Vigilent, an Oakland-based AI-powered cooling optimization company that serves over 1,500 data center and telecom facilities across 36 countries. A serial entrepreneur and seasoned technology executive, Housley has led multiple companies through turnarounds, acquisitions, and growth phases across optical networking, display technology, and enterprise software. At Vigilent, he oversees a platform backed by 52 patents in applied AI that has collectively reduced energy consumption by hundreds of millions of kilowatt hours and eliminated hundreds of thousands of tons of CO2 emissions globally.