Phaidra (an AI-based control system that helps facilities like data centers improve energy efficiency and increase compute infrastructure) announced $12 million in new funding led by Index Ventures, bringing the total capital raised to $60.5 million.
This new funding round will enable Phaidra to accelerate the expansion of its autonomous control systems, which use reinforcement learning to help data centers optimize their power usage while improving reliability. And this announcement comes at a time when rapid AI innovation relies on scaling computing.
Combined with a shortage of power and skilled labor needed to support mission-critical facilities like data centers, this is contributing to a global crisis where AI innovation is constrained by a lack of computing infrastructure.
Data centers are very energy-intensive and it consumes 10 to 50 times the energy per floor space compared to a typical commercial office building. As AI models proliferate, relying on resource-hungry GPUs, existing markets are struggling to meet demand.
Phaidra’s AI control platform turns industrial facilities into intelligent and self-learning systems that combine the precision of manual methods with the scalability and efficiency offered by AI. And it integrates into existing building management systems to capture real-time data, feed that data into its cloud-based reinforcement learning agent, and autonomously alter the settings on the individual components to achieve optimal performance of the entire system seamlessly.
Unlike traditional control systems, which slowly degrade and require regular manual programming updates, Phaidra learns and gets better over time automatically. Phaidra’s early customers have seen efficiency improvements amounting to millions of dollars in cost savings, which leads to increased power availability for revenue-generating services.
Phaidra’s founding team features a rare mix of specific engineering know-how and world-class AI research credentials. And while working as a data center operator at Google, co-founder and CEO Jim Gao was inspired by the AlphaGo documentary to explore how machine-learning technology could be applied to improve efficiency in Google’s data centers. His enthusiasm caught the attention of Phaidra’s now-CTO Vedavyas Panneershelvam, who had worked as a primary research engineer on AlphaGo.
They joined forces at DeepMind, where they developed AI-powered solutions that reduced the amount of energy needed to cool Google’s data centers by 30%. And after publishing their findings, Gao and Panneershelvam were approached by industrial control systems engineer Katie Hoffman, who was leading innovation projects at Trane Technologies and later joined as Phaidra’s third co-founder and COO.
Phaidra’s team of about 100 includes top software engineers and researchers from Google, DeepMind, Meta, and Amazon, along with specialists from leading engineering firms like Trane and Johnson Controls. This new funding will support continued investment in research and development, implementation, and customer success, along with expanded go-to-market efforts as Phaidra continues its mission of helping data centers worldwide optimize their energy usage.
KEY QUOTES:
“For as much as we talk about AI and growing compute capacity, we are ignoring the heart of the problem—power. There is no AI without sufficient energy. The more time we spent researching this problem, the more clearly we saw the importance of investing in solutions that address the downstream effects of computational growth. Phaidra is a perfect example of the right team with the right product in the right place at a unique moment in time.”
“When you meet the team and talk to their customers, it’s clear that Phaidra is in a unique position to tackle this problem head-on. No other startup has the domain expertise and AI research chops to actually deliver on the promise of autonomous controls, to say nothing of the impressive performance and results they’ve already shown. We’re excited to see Phaidra take the next step as a company and deliver solutions that are not only critical to data centers’ growth and sustainability but to the overall growth and sustainability of AI development, the technology industry, and the world at large.”
- Martin Mignot, Partner at Index Ventures
“The data center industry was already growing quickly and is hitting an inflection point thanks to turbocharged AI demand. Every data center operator knows they will need to be more efficient to meet this growing demand. At Phaidra, we’re on a mission to revolutionize how data centers are managed with an AI-powered control system that not only adapts in real time, but also continuously learns and improves. The result is cost savings on a massive scale and more revenue to drive further growth.”
- Jim Gao, co-founder and CEO of Phaidra
