EPIC Microsystems has emerged from stealth and secured $21 million in an oversubscribed Series A round, bringing its total funding to $26 million. The round was led by Seligman Ventures, with backing from Intel Capital, AICONIC Ventures, Cambium Capital, and existing investors including A&E Investments, Assam Ventures, and Nepenthe Capital.
The capital will push forward the company’s vertical power delivery architecture, a critical piece of the puzzle as AI systems demand more energy than ever before. As part of the investment, Umesh Padval, Managing Partner at Seligman Ventures, joins the company’s Board of Directors, bringing experience in scaling deep tech companies.
The power bottleneck behind AI’s growth
AI’s rapid expansion is exposing a less visible constraint: power delivery. Data centres are now pushing toward rack densities nearing one megawatt, a level where traditional systems begin to break down.
Conventional inductor-based designs struggle to keep up. They consume space, generate heat, and limit how densely components can be packed. For hyperscalers, this creates a difficult balancing act, managing current density, controlling temperatures, and fitting everything within tight physical constraints.
These trade-offs directly impact efficiency and cost. Performance per watt and performance per dollar, both crucial metrics, are increasingly harder to optimise with legacy architectures. The challenge is no longer just about computing power. It’s about how effectively that power can be delivered.
A shift from legacy design constraints
EPIC Microsystems is tackling this problem with a different approach. Its hybrid switched-capacitor (HSC) architecture replaces bulky inductors with a streamlined mix of capacitors and optimised components. This change reduces the physical footprint while improving efficiency. The design is compact and low-profile, making it better suited for modern rack configurations where vertical space or z-height is a limiting factor.
The benefits extend beyond size. By lowering heat generation, the architecture improves thermal performance across the system. In turn, this allows data centres to run more efficiently without overloading cooling systems.
Built with AI accelerators and GPUs in mind, the solution is tailored for the workloads driving today’s infrastructure evolution. It offers a way to scale performance without forcing compromises elsewhere in the system.
The experienced team behind this idea
EPIC Microsystems was founded by Sabin Eftimie and Wonyoung Kim in 2024 in San Francisco. Sabin is the Co-Founder and CEO of EPIC Microsystems. Prior to founding the company, he led the DC-DC power engineering team at Dialog Semiconductor (acquired by Renesas Electronics). He has nearly 25 years of experience designing high-performance ICs and power systems, with more than 10 years in hybrid switched-capacitor ICs. He holds a PhD from the University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest, Romania.
Wonyoung is the Co-Founder and COO of EPIC Microsystems. Previously, he was Co-Founder and CEO of Lion Semiconductor (acquired by Cirrus Logic in 2021 for $335M). Lion Semiconductor was a San Francisco-based developer of high-efficiency, switched-capacitor battery management ICs, specializing in ultra-fast wired and wireless charging for mobile devices. Founded in 2013, the company developed patented technology to reduce heat and improve charging speeds in consumer electronics. He holds a PhD in Power Electronics from Harvard University.
Detailing the motivation behind this idea to TFN, they said, “EPIC Microsystems was founded to introduce a fundamentally new architecture for DC-DC power solutions. As traditional approaches have reached performance limits, the company’s hybrid switched-capacitor design addresses a multi-dimensional challenge spanning power efficiency, current density, z-height, transient performance, and thermal management. This enables hyperscalers to maximise AI infrastructure performance in both performance per watt and performance per dollar.”
From consumer tech roots to data centre power innovation
The team behind EPIC Microsystems is not new to rethinking power design. Before founding the company, its engineers helped pioneer switched-capacitor solutions in the mobile industry.
Those innovations enabled fast charging technologies used in hundreds of millions of smartphones and laptops worldwide. More importantly, they demonstrated the team’s ability to take complex power architectures from concept to mass deployment.
Now, that experience is being applied to a far larger challenge, AI data centres. The stakes are higher, but the principle remains the same and it is improving efficiency at the core of how power is delivered.
Looking ahead
Following its Series A and with a silicon-proven architecture, EPIC Microsystems plans to accelerate development of its DC-DC power solutions, expand its engineering team, and advance toward commercialisation. Initial deployments in AI data centres are targeted for late 2027.
“Power density, efficiency and thermal management have become primary bottlenecks in scaling AI data centre infrastructure,” said Umesh Padval, Managing Partner at Seligman Ventures. “EPIC’s technical team brings deep expertise in switched-capacitor innovation and a clear understanding of data centre requirements. We believe their vertical power delivery architecture is well positioned to address the next generation of AI system demands.”
“AI data centre architectures are breaking historic power boundaries, and existing power delivery ecosystems simply can’t keep up,” said Sabin Eftimie, co-founder and CEO of EPIC Microsystems. “Our approach reimagines DC-DC power delivery from the ground up. By addressing efficiency, thermals, and rack densification simultaneously, we give hyperscalers greater architectural flexibility as rack power scales toward the multi-megawatt era. I am very excited that an experienced investor and semiconductor industry veteran like Umesh has joined the Board of Directors to help us capitalise on the unprecedented opportunity that is in front of us.”
“The AI compute roadmap is being defined as much by power delivery innovation as by advances in AI compute silicon,” said Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel and long-time semiconductor industry leader.
“As workloads scale and infrastructure densifies, the industry must rethink foundational system architectures,” said Andrew Tan, Managing Director, A&E Investments and Salience. “Breakthroughs in how power is delivered and managed will be essential to unlocking the next decade of AI performance. EPIC Microsystems is addressing a critical layer of that challenge.”
