thermal-management
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The Invisible Chemistry Inside Modern Life
Momentive rarely appears on the box. Its silicones, silanes and specialty additives are the reason thousands of other products can survive heat, moisture, motion and time.
The 140-Year-Old Thermostat Company Cooling the AI Boom
Johnson Controls began with a classroom that was too hot. Today, its chillers, controls and service crews sit at the intersection of two expensive problems: buildings use too much energy, and AI infrastructure produces too much heat.
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.
xMEMS
xMEMS is a Santa Clara semiconductor company that builds sound and cooling out of silicon. Its piezoMEMS platform produces the world's first solid-state MEMS loudspeakers - all-silicon drivers with no moving voice coils - for earbuds, hearing aids, AI glasses and headphones, and the first 'fan-on-a-chip' active micro-cooling device that moves air inside phones, wearables and AI data-center optics. Founded in 2018, the company holds more than 300 patents and has raised roughly $129M across four rounds.
Vimano
Vimano is a Bengaluru-based deep-tech startup building PFAS-free, ion-selective nanotech membranes for the electrochemical devices that power the energy transition - redox flow batteries, AEM electrolyzers, and hydrogen fuel cells. Its proprietary membrane platform tackles the ion-crossover problem that limits efficiency in long-duration energy storage and green hydrogen, and it also adapts the same polymer-film science to thermal management films for satellites. The company's stated goal is to sit inside 1 out of every 2 large-scale energy storage devices, electrolyzers and fuel cells on the planet.
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.
Akash Systems
Akash Systems is a San Francisco deep-tech company building chips and systems cooled by lab-grown diamond. Its patented GaN-on-Diamond technology pulls heat away from transistors at the nanometer scale, powering everything from CubeSat radios that beam data at 5 Gbps to AI servers that run cooler at higher density. Backed by Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund and the U.S. CHIPS Act, the company is building a 40,000 sq ft diamond-semiconductor fab in West Oakland.