Apheros helps data centers cool down. Check out the pitch deck it used to secure $1.85 million.

• Apheros has secured $1.85 million in pre-seed funding for its data center cooling technology.
• The Zurich-based startup has developed and patented a metal foam technology.
• Check out the pitch deck it used to secure the fresh funding.

A startup that helps data centers to cool down has just secured $1.85 million in pre-seed funding.

Zurich-based Apheros, which launched in August last year as a spinout from ETH Zurich, has developed and patented a new cooling solution for data centres.

Data centers are famously energy-intensive and currently consume 3% of the world's energy — a figure expected to grow as AI adoption accelerates.

"We take a device called a heat sink, whose purpose is to bring heat away from your chip, your GPU, and into the surroundings and the coolant — and we've optimized it through usage of a metal foam," said cofounder and CEO Julia Carpenter.

Essentially, this manufacturing process creates foam structures that have had their surface area increased one thousandfold, which in turn maximizes the dissipation of heat in data centers.

These foams can be integrated within existing cooling systems in a bid to reduce the amount of energy otherwise consumed by data centres by up to 10 to 20 percent, Carpenter said.

Apheros is currently generating revenue by working with design leaders in the space and is also in talks with semiconductor company Broadcom to help improve the design of their solutions.

Fundraising was relatively smooth for the upstart. "We're in Switzerland, which is known to be a very big hub for deep tech, early-stage companies. So for us, there were a lot of opportunities here and really good networks," Carpenter told BI.

The $1.85 million pre-seed round was led by Swiss fund Founderful.

With the cash injection, Apheros will scale its production and aim to grow its headcount to 15.

Check out the 10-slide pitch deck used to secure the fresh funds.