Swiss startup Corintis has emerged from stealth and raised $24 million in a Series A funding round.

The announcement was made in the same week Microsoft revealed it had developed an in-chip microfluidic cooling system, in collaboration with Corintis.

Led by BlueYard Capital with participation from Founderful, Acequia Capital, Celsius Industries, and XTX Ventures, this latest round brings the company’s total funding to $33.4 million. Additionally, Intel CEO and chairman of Walden International, Lip-Bu Tan, has joined the company’s board of investors, alongside Geoff Lyon, former CEO and founder of CoolIT.

Corintis said it would use the funds to expand into the US and open an engineering hub in Munich, Germany.

Formed in 2022 out of research from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Corintis develops microfluidic cooling for use in data centers.

The company says its technology combines simulation and optimization software with new manufacturing methods, resulting in a liquid cooling offering that is “adapted to the chip to bring the right liquid to the right location.” The system 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.’

Corintis says it has already shipped more than 10,000 cooling systems for advanced AI deployments.

One such deployment was with Microsoft, which published details of its project last week. The company claimed that a prototype version of the system, which pushes coolant through tiny channels etched into the chip, removed heat up to three times better than traditional cold plates, while also reducing the maximum temperature rise of the silicon inside a GPU by 65 percent.

With the coolant reaching the silicon, rather than a plate on top of the chip, it also means that it does not need to be as cold. This, Microsoft said, means less energy needs to be spent chilling the coolant, and that the waste heat will be at a higher grade, as much as 70°C (158°F), adding that, in the future, it could also allow for the development of 3D chips.

“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,” said Remco van Erp, co-founder and CEO of Corintis.

“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.”

He added: “Thermal engineers need to pull a rabbit out of a hat on a daily basis to make sure chips don’t overheat and break, and that’s where Corintis comes in. Our mission is to unlock 10x better cooling to enable the future of compute, in a short cycle time, and while leveraging the existing infrastructure investments in a data center today. As our recent collaboration with Microsoft highlights, there’s an industry-wide push to advance the limits of cooling to enable a future of compute that’s not limited by heat.”