Heat has a way of telling the truth. It exposes weak infrastructure, lazy assumptions, and every datacenter design that thought yesterday’s air could survive tomorrow’s compute. Accelsius exists because AI and HPC stopped asking nicely. Founded in 2022 by Innventure, Inc., this Austin-based company stepped into a world where racks are pushing 130 kW, cooling eats up to 40% of facility power, and everyone is pretending that incremental fixes will hold. They won’t. Air is done auditioning for relevance.
Accelsius secured $65M in Series B funding, led by Johnson Controls, with strategic participation from Legrand. Stack that with the $40M Series B-1 that closed days earlier and you are looking at $105M in fresh capital, $129M total disclosed funding. Capital does not chase vibes at this scale. It chases inevitability. The market has decided that liquid is no longer optional, and two-phase is where the math actually works.
The NeuCool platform is not a lab demo or a theoretical curve. It is cooling 4,500W+ per socket with 0.020 C/W thermal resistance on production GPUs, using a waterless dielectric refrigerant that does not freak out facilities teams or sustainability officers. The MR250 row-based CDU takes that physics and makes it deployable, rack to row to campus, built for AI factories measured in MW, not marketing slogans. This is infrastructure that expects density shock and shows up early.
Leadership matters when the physics get loud. CEO Josh Claman has spent decades inside data centers watching density creep turn into density collision. CTO Dr. Richard Bonner brought Bell Labs DNA and thermal discipline that treats heat like a solvable engineering constraint, not a line item to be negotiated. This team did not chase headlines. They chased thermal limits until the limits blinked first.
Johnson Controls brings facility-scale reach. Legrand brings power, racks, and global distribution. DarkNX is committing NeuCool across a 300 MW campus in Ontario. NVIDIA Inception, TACC, and the U.S. Department of Energy are not decorative logos. They are signals that cooling is now a first-order design decision, not an afterthought.
Accelsius is not selling cold air in a hotter market. It is selling headroom. And for operators building gigawatt-class AI infrastructure, headroom is the difference between ambition on paper and compute that actually ships.
