Iceotope, a deeptech portfolio company focusing on immersion liquid cooling for DCs, has secured a growth equity round led by ABC Impact.
We are excited to announce today the closing of a $36m growth equity round led by ABC Impact on our portfolio company Iceotope, a deeptech company focusing on immersion liquid cooling. Other notable new investors are nVent, the US headquarters Corporate, large UK impact funds Northern Grid Stone, SDCL Energy Efficiency Income Trust, Pavilion Capital and British Patient Capital. Existing investors also participated to the round.
It has been quite a journey since the first days of our initial investment back in 2014: investing in a handful people shop proved to be challenging but we have realised over time that the initial investment thesis holds quite a bit. Increasingly the datacenter market – the initial focus for the company – represents a growing portion of the electricity consumed around the world. As the impact of CO2 emissions worsen with major meteorological disruptions across the globe, the major cloud, colo and IT players are confronted to stricter regulations to reduce both water and energy consumption to run increasingly powerful compute workloads. The arrival of crypto/blockchain, the pervasiveness of AI applications – metaverse and auto-generative conversational bots such as Chat GPT – are making the situation increasingly worse. That’s where Iceotope is playing a crucial rule, by enabling datacenter investors and operators to reduce the power efficiency of those machines (Power Usage Effectiveness is the golden standard in this industry) down to world record 1.03[1] while new born datacenters are typically 20-40% more energy eater (and legacy installations are 100-150% more).
During more than 5 years of research backed by leading research universities such as Leeds and Sheffield (UK), Iceotope has developed a leading immersion cooling solution that is protected by about a hundred patents, and it is now commercialized with some of the largest players of the cloud and datacenter industry.
According to Gartner, Immersion cooling systems can deliver better cooling efficiency than the widely used passive and forced-air cooling systems. It is also more effective than the traditional liquid cooling solutions that route liquid coolant to specific high-power components within the server. This enables high-performance compute systems to be operated in very dense configurations or environments where air-based cooling may not be viable or effective, such as edge infrastructure deployments in a non-data center environment.
With the new money raised and the support of a global set of investors who share the same commitment to enable a digital revolution that doesn’t cost the earth, Iceotope will double down on its US and Asia presence while pushing to keep ahead of competitors through continue recruitment of talent engineers both in the UK and in the US.
At Aster, we are proud to have been one of the earliest backers of Iceotope and look forward to seeing the company continue to grow and succeed in the years to come. We believe that the Company has the potential to transform the way we design and operate cooling in computing, and we are excited to support them as they can massively contribute to a digital revolution that respects our planet.
[1] Meaning for each kWh of compute power, 1.03 kWh are effectively absorbed by the grid