HexSeed raises £600,000 for diamond coatings to cool AI chips
The Scottish semiconductor materials startup has closed an early-stage round led by climate-tech venture builder Carbon13, with money going towards scaling a low-temperature diamond coating for power chips.
HexSeed Technology, a semiconductor materials company based in Scotland, has raised more than £600,000 in early-stage funding.
Carbon13, a climate-tech venture builder, led the round. The Net Zero Technology Centre and the Italian venture capital firm Vento also put money in.
The company makes a diamond coating that is applied at low temperature. Diamond conducts heat well, and the coating is intended to stop power semiconductors in AI systems from overheating.
Power semiconductors handle the electricity feeding data centre hardware. As AI workloads push more power through them, the heat has to go somewhere.
The money is earmarked for scaling that coating technology, according to the account of the round.
The backer list says something about how the company is being positioned. Carbon13 and the Net Zero Technology Centre both invest against emissions targets rather than pure chip performance, which puts HexSeed's pitch in the energy column as much as the semiconductor one.
Vento's involvement adds an investor from outside the UK at a round size where most cheques are usually local.
For founders selling hardware into data centres, the read is straightforward. Cooling and power draw are now budget lines that climate-focused funds will write cheques against, not just engineering problems buried in a spec sheet.
HexSeed has not published a timeline for commercial deployment, customer names or performance figures for the coating.