Vertical Semiconductor raises $11m
Vertical Semiconductor, a spin-out from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has announced $11 million in seed funding to help accelerate development of vertical GaN transistors to deliver the next wave of power to AI chips in data centres.
The company’s GaN transistors are designed to ease data centre power bottlenecks by pushing energy conversion closer to the chip. This is said to improve efficiency by up to 30 percent and enable a 50 percent smaller power footprint in AI data centre racks.
“The pace of AI is not only limited by algorithms. The most significant bottleneck in AI hardware is how fast we can deliver power to the silicon,” said Cynthia Liao, CEO and co-founder of Vertical. “We’re not just improving efficiency, we’re enabling the next wave of innovation by rewriting how electricity is delivered in data centres at scale.”
Vertical's technology is built on on a decade of research at MIT’s Palacios Group – a GaN research lab. The company has demonstrated the technology on 8-inch wafers using standard silicon CMOS semiconductor manufacturing methods, enabling integration with existing process technology and making it ready for real-world deployment for devices from 100V to 1.2kV.
“The Vertical team has cracked a challenge that’s stymied the industry for years: how to deliver high voltage and high efficiency power electronics with a scalable, manufacturable solution,” said Matt Hershenson, Venture Partner at Playground Global, which led the funding round. “They’re not just advancing the science – they’re changing the economics of compute.”
Additional investors include JIMCO Technology Ventures, Milemark•Capital, and Shin-Etsu Chemical.
Pictured above: founders of Vertical Semiconductor: Josh Perozek, Cynthia Liao, and Tomás Palacios
