AI’s rapid progress has collided with the physical limits of computation. Power-hungry GPUs and accelerators generate enormous heat, demanding more advanced cooling. NVIDIA’s recent adoption of liquid cooling highlights the urgency. Without effective thermal management, even the most advanced chips cannot operate at peak performance. Corintis addresses this barrier by integrating cooling directly into chip design, delivering up to a tenfold improvement in efficiency while also reducing water consumption, an ecological challenge facing data centres worldwide.
Corintis, a semiconductor cooling startup, has emerged from stealth with a $24 million Series A. The round was led by BlueYard Capital with participation from Founderful, Acequia Capital, Celsius Industries, and XTX Ventures. With this, the total funding raised by the company accounts for $33.4 million.
With new funding, the company looks to scale its already sizable team of 55 employees today to over 70 by the end of the year, and ramp up its manufacturing footprint even further, aiming to achieve a capacity exceeding a million microfluidic cold plates annually during 2026.
In addition to this, industry leaders, including Lip-Bu Tan, Intel CEO, and Geoff Lyon, former CEO of CoolIT, both join the board, bringing deep expertise in semiconductor and cooling technologies.
Co-designed microfluidic cooling
Corintis is rooted in research from the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). Founded by Dr. Remco van Erp, Sam Harrison, and Prof. Elison Matioli, the company blends academic insight with engineering execution. Their mission is to build a bridge between chip design and cooling systems, creating thermal solutions that evolve alongside the chips themselves. Corintis’s technology focuses on microfluidic cooling, in which optimised micro-scale liquid cooling for computer chips in data centres, which are used for advanced computation, including for generative AI.
Co-designed microfluidic cooling
The company’s core innovation lies in co-designed microfluidic cooling”. Corintis develops best-in-class simulation and optimisation software and new manufacturing methods to design micro-scale optimised liquid cooling, or Microfluidic cooling, that is adapted to the chip to bring the right liquid to the right location. This can be supplied as either a drop-in replacement to any liquid cooling system today, or integrated together with the chip, as “co-packaged cooling”, to reach up to an order of magnitude increase in cooling performance. Their technology also enables data centers to reduce their water consumption, a key ecological concern of AI technologies.
Also, Corintis’ platform builds a bridge between chip and cooling design, enabling chip designers to build the next generation of AI chips with superior thermal performance. The technology platforms the company has already developed include Glacierware, to help automate the design of cooling systems, a copper microfluidic manufacturing facility to manufacture cold plates with features as small as a human hair in high volume, and its Therminator platform, allowing chip companies to physically emulate next-gen chips with millimetre accuracy on silicon test chips before production to validate their cooling solution ahead of time.
Collaboration with Microsoft
In addition to having several major American tech giants as customers, the company already enjoys a partnership with Microsoft to help bring this technology to the real world. Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that in collaboration with Corintis, it has achieved a breakthrough by developing an in-chip microfluidic cooling system that can effectively cool a server running core services. Tests showed that microfluidic cooling embedded inside the chip removed heat three times better than the most advanced technology commonly used today.
Since its incorporation, Corintis has already deployed more than 10,000 cooling systems, achieving 8-digit revenue and working with top-tier clients, including collaborations with Microsoft.
Final thoughts
The combination of academic origins, industrial partnerships, and a forward-looking product suite positions Corintis as a linchpin in the evolution of computing. If the startup delivers on its ambition to scale production, it could become an indispensable player not just in AI, but in broader applications such as climate modeling and drug discovery, where computational power is everything.
Lip-Bu Tan added, “Cooling is one of the biggest challenges for next-generation chips. Corintis is fast becoming the industry leader in advanced semiconductor cooling solutions to address the thermal bottleneck, as made evident by its growing customer list.”
“The thermal margin is translated at the software layer to yield more performance and overclocking potential. It also enables new 3-D architectures for chips that are not possible today due to thermal limitations of stacking high-power SOC’s without inner layer cooling,” said Husam Alissa, director of systems technology in Cloud Operations and Innovation at Microsoft, on the recent breakthrough.
Remco van Erp, Co-Founder & CEO of Corintis, said: “Every chip is unique. It’s like a cityscape with hundreds of billions of transistors, connected by countless wires. Cooling today is not adapted to the chip, relying on simplistic designs where several parallel fins are carved into a block of copper with a blade. But just like in nature, the optimal design for each chip is a complex network of precisely shaped micro-scale channels that are adapted to the chip and guide coolant to the most critical regions. Finding the right design per chip to create increasingly better cooling systems under short timelines is a challenge that will only get harder. ”
