What the business is
GemaTEG, based in Bellevue, Wash., makes patent-pending micro heat pumps and heat exchangers that cool individual processors in data centers.
The bet
Cooling each chip with its own micro heat pump, tuned to workload, lets processors run faster on less energy than server-level liquid cooling.
Starting capital
About $10 million from equity investments, grants and bank loans, including $150,000 won at the 2023 Flywheel Investment Conference
How it started
Maurizio Miozza, a nuclear physicist who spent nearly 22 years at UmbraGroup, met Manfred Markevitch when Markevitch sat on UmbraGroup's board from 2016 to 2018. Both European-born US citizens, they decided to start a venture in 2019 without a specific project in mind, wanting to show that sustainability and profitable growth are not adversaries. They settled on a micro heat-pump architecture that works at the level of individual chips.
What happened
The AI boom made computing performance and energy efficiency bigger problems than the founders had foreseen. GemaTEG says its localized cooling can raise chip performance by more than 30% while lowering overall energy use. It has worked with Leonardo for nearly two years, embedded as an extension of the group's team, and is collaborating with EPFL-EcoCloud. It also won renewal of the Solar Impulse Foundation's Efficient Solution Label.
How it ended up
GemaTEG announced a partnership with Leonardo to improve its Davinci-1 supercomputer and hopes to take part in the upgrade to Da Vinci 2. It is in talks with other high-performance computing companies and says it is generating revenue without disclosing results.
What has to be true
AI workloads make computing performance and energy efficiency harder, so per-chip control addresses a growing need.
The technology is patent-pending and chip-agnostic, so it can be tuned to different chip types and workloads.
A customer partnership with Leonardo gives the startup a flagship supercomputer reference.
Working embedded inside Leonardo for nearly two years let GemaTEG tailor its approach to the customer's own needs, per CEO Markevitch.
What can be applied
A founding team that starts with a goal rather than a product can land on a technology that a later market shift, here the AI boom, turns into a sharper need.
Aftermath
As of 2024-11-08 GemaTEG is a privately held company of about 15 employees (30 with advisors and contractors) with offices in the US, Switzerland and Italy. It is working toward a role in Leonardo's Da Vinci 2 upgrade and in talks with other high-performance computing firms. Its performance claims are the company's own.
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