M Ventures led seed funding for NovoLINC, a thermal technology startup that came out of Carnegie Mellon University. Foothill Ventures and TDK Ventures also participated.
NovoLINC’s co-founders, CSO Prof. Sheng Shen and CTO Dr. Rui Cheng, claim that the company’s innovative nanocomposite thermal solutions lower thermal resistance to an industry-record low (< 1mm²-K/W).
NovoLINC’s founders have also been awarded grant funding through ARPA-E’s COOLERCHIPS Programs and the Partnerships for Innovation program of the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Enormous heat generation is a direct result of electronic chipsets’ ever rising performance and power demands. The power consumption of NVIDIA GPUs has increased over the past ten years, rising from about 250W to 1,200W for flagship models.
Similarly, between 2019 and 2024, the power consumption of AMD and Intel CPUs roughly tripled. However, as AI datacenters move toward liquid cooling, thermal interface solutions have not kept up, making them one of the main obstacles to effective heat dispersion and efficient cooling.
By offering its goods to semiconductor businesses and hyperscalers, NovoLINC’s technology directly tackles these issues.
Leadership Comments
Prof. Shen and Dr. Cheng commented: “With its unique nanostructured composite design, the NovoLINC technology offers outstanding thermal performance and reliability for cooling high-power electronics, such as CPUs and GPUs, making it particularly valuable for the rapidly growing data center industry.”
“Our team is collaborating closely with industrial partners to accelerate the manufacturing scaleup and the commercialization of our technology to meet the surging needs of high-power computing and sustainable AI data center operations,” added company co-founder and CEO, Dr. Ning Li.
Tobias Egle, M Ventures‘ associate commented: “Efficient thermal interface solutions have become a crucial aspect of data center infrastructure due to the increasing power in packages, shrinking features, and heterogeneous integration of chips. We are delighted to welcome the NovoLINC team to our semiconductor portfolio.”
Eric Rosenblum, Foothill Ventures’ Managing Partner, added: “There is a current goldrush in the tech community around AI applications, supported by ever more powerful chips and faster connections. However, there is an increasing realization that this boom is capped by energy consumption and heat dissipation. NovoLINC addresses both head-on, and we are thrilled to back them as they start this journey.”
“Cooling contributes to 40% of data center’s energy consumption. NovoLINC’s thermal interface solutions offer the industry’s lowest thermal resistance, and scalable solutions to keep up with the ever-increasing power and heat generated by the next-generation computing chips. We are excited to partner with NovoLINC to make chip cooling more efficient,” remarked Tina Tosukhowong, TDK Ventures’ Investment Director.