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Mike Francis Is Turning a Garage Experiment Into Infrastructure Armor
The NanoTech Materials CEO went from programming a calculator he meant to use for cheating to building ceramic coatings for roofs, bridges and industrial plants. His harder invention may be a company where every employee gets to think like an owner.
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.