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When researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), developed a cooling system for particles traveling at light speed through the world’s largest and highest-energy collider, they never imagined that the technology would one day be used to make corporate data centers more sustainable.

Data centers currently use 1% to 1.5% of global electricity but as demand grows for new digital services and technologies, such as AI, by some estimates they could use as much as 20% of all electricity available worldwide, resulting in massive CO2 impact equal to that of the aviation and shipping industries combined. Much of the energy is used for air conditioning or fans to cool the servers but it’s the chips that are the source of the heat. A startup called Incooling, one of 52 new deep-tech ventures created by Dutch venture builder HighTechXL, found a way to use CERN’s phase technology to cool the chips directly, significantly cutting electricity use – and related CO2 emissions – while radically improving the performance of semiconductors.  In June Incooling announced test results with chip maker AMD that established a new world record in central processing unit (CPU) performance, an example, the startup says, of the potential that cooling solutions can unlock when integrated with next-generation CPUs.

That’s the kind of impact that HighTechXL seeks, says CEO John Bell, a former executive at both Philips and at Johnson & Johnson’s, where he collaborated closely with startups to co-create products.  The venture builder scouts advanced technologies from research institutions and tech companies, assesses them based on their patent position, novelty, manufacturability, and knowledge transfer, then explores ways of using them to tackle grand societal challenges and begins the venture-building process. Its shareholders include Dutch chip equipment maker ASML and Dutch healthcare company Philips.

“Deep Tech is needed to help solve the world’s most pressing problems but is complicated, highly risky and it takes time – it can take eight to ten years for companies to start earning revenues,” says Bell. “We believe that by putting together the right IP with the right people and mobilizing the Deep Tech ecosystem we are well positioned for success.”

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Supermetrics, a data integration platform, has developed an out-of-the-box software-as-a-service data management and analysis tool to help marketers compile data in ready-to-use format and automatically move it to their favorite data crunching and reportipg tools, such as Google Sheets, Google Data Studio, Excel, business intelligence tools and data warehouses. The tool helps marketers and their teams see what is and isn’t performing, and pull data from multiple platforms to gain an overall unified view. Customers include Accenture, Dentsu and Electrolux.
 
The Finnish scale-up, which reported €51.1 million in annual revenues last year, is not stopping there. The company, which was named in March of this year as one of the Top 100 Next Unicorns"  by boutique investment banking company GP Bullhound and the Vivatechnology conference, has ambitions to become what founder and CEO Mikael Thuneberg calls a marketing intelligence Cloud. “We want to build things on top of the data to make it more valuable,” he says.” In the future people will be able to take actions on the data on our platform and we will be able to make recommendations for you.”
 

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