data-center-cooling
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.