Why We Invested in Frore Systems? Making Moore’s Law Scale!
By Rajeev Madhavan, Co-founder and Partner, Clear Ventures
The meeting with Seshu Madhavapeddy and Surya Ganti started with me telling them, “We’re staying away from investment-heavy semiconductor companies.” I only took the meeting because Seshu was a prior customer, but forty-five minutes later the entire Clear team joined us in the conference room. We decided to invest in the company and two days later, we were in!
Having been an operator in the semiconductor space, I had seen many start up pitches for key technologies addressing challenges in semi — I’d “been there, done that”. Clear had looked at investing in many large digital semi chips for AI, but we chose to focus on investment in software of various kinds.
But Seshu and Surya surprised us. Falling in love with technology is something a VC should never do, but there are some cases where you can’t avoid it. This was one such case. Frore was onto something big.
In 1965, Intel Founder Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors in a microprocessor chip would double every two years, leading to an exponential increase in computer performance. This observation became Moore’s law. For a long period, everyone got accustomed to believing that computer speed/performance would double every two years — until about 10 years ago when performance growth started slowing down. While some think Moore’s law is dead, others believe — as I do — it has simply run into a major roadblock… HEAT.
While the growth rate of processor performance has decreased, heat generation has steadily increased! Why? With Moore’s law slowing down, as the number of transistors on a chip increased, so did the heat generated by the chip. Heat has become THE limiting factor in processor performance.
The result? See the trends shown below.
Excessive heat can cause the chip to malfunction or become damaged, so computer manufacturers have developed various cooling systems in an effort to keep the chips from overheating. Traditional cooling solutions range from passive heat sinks, to active systems like mechanical fans. But these solutions have hit a performance ceiling. In addition, for many small or densely packed systems, a fan is simply not an option. The bottom line is that the cooling system has become the real limiting factor for all computer systems. To cope with this limitation, manufacturers program computing systems to reduce heat by throttling down processor performance, literally forcing the computer to run slower.
Frore set out to solve this challenge.
Frore has accomplished something many thought impossible — the world’s first solid-state chip for active device cooling, the AirJet®. Their solution uses “a chip” to solve the cooling problem. The patented technology uses a “pulsating jet” airflow to cool computers. The breakthrough AirJet® chip silently pulls ambient air into small intake slots in the top of the chip and exits hot air out sideways through a spout. The groundbreaking multi-physics chip design converges structural, fluidic, acoustic, and electrical resonance, and is manufactured using innovative proprietary techniques drawn from a diverse range of sectors including semiconductors, flat panel displays, aerospace, and the automotive industry. AirJet is thin, silent, and powerful, giving device manufacturers far more flexibility with their designs.
Frore is initially targeting the notebook market — they already have a collaboration with Intel for the Intel Evo laptops — delivering a 2x improvement in notebook performance. But at Clear, we see the application for AirJet as much broader and much more pervasive. Ultimately, AirJet will be used to improve smartphones, smart cameras, big TVs, servers, gaming devices, virtual reality, drones … and pretty much ALL devices where heat is generated. For example, to deliver the best immersive experience, virtual reality headsets will need ever-increasing computing power to support high-end graphics, causing excessive heat. Airjet, with its small size and highly effective heat removal capability, is the only technology capable of meeting this emerging demand.
We welcome Seshu Madhavapeddy, Surya Ganti, and the rest of the Frore team to the Clear Ventures family. We’ve been watching the product evolve over the last four years, from the early days in the founder's garage to today — delivering a technically advanced, innovative solution for an industry-wide challenge. The Frore team is set to revolutionize cooling and disrupt the entire computing industry. It may sound hyperbolic, but it is a huge deal and Clear Ventures is happy to be on the journey with them.
About Rajeev Madhavan
Rajeev has been an angel investor since 1998 and co-founded Clear in 2016. Prior to that, Rajeev founded three successful startups in the semiconductor IP and Electronic Design Automation (EDA) space. The most recent, Magma Design Automation, became the fourth largest EDA company in the world under his leadership.
Today, Clear Ventures has $335 million of capital from a world-class investor base and is an investor currently in about 25 active companies, 90% as first investors.
