Asetek getting $4M in Venture Capital

[W1zzard]

asetek today announced the investment of €4 million from Northzone Ventures, Vaekstfonden and a group of existing investors. asetek is the leader in high performance and next generation mainstream personal computer chip cooling sporting international brands such as VapoChill® and WaterChill™.

“Through in-house research & development and acquisition asetek has built and patented an impressive product portfolio that addresses mainstream and specialized cooling demands in terms of performance, noise and assembly convenience, and due to significant innovations asetek can provide these cooling solutions at competitive prices”, says Gregers Kronborg, partner in Northzone Ventures, “We see several technology and market trends that asetek can leverage to achieve significant market penetration in next generation personal computer systems”.

Despite the arrival of multi-core CPU’s with lower overall power consumption, thermal management has not become easier as shrinking dies implies increased heat fluxes and demand for lower noise and radically smaller PC form factors eat up much of the achievements, thus stretching traditional fan-sink based cooling solutions beyond their capacity.

“I am thrilled with the investment that will enable us to pursue the business success that we believe our technology innovation and market demand warrants”, says André Sloth Eriksen, founder and CEO of asetek, “This first round of a VC backed investment will allow us to market the results of 2 years of development of a ground-breaking liquid cooling technology, that accommodates convenient OEM integration, as it has a very compact form factor, high reliability and a low cost compared to other high performance liquid cooling systems on the market”.

The PC market and the CPU and VGA roadmaps become more segmented than ever before – especially with the arrival of Small Form Factor (SFF) PC’s, Home Theater PC’s (HTPC) and high performance gaming PC’s. Noise has become a serious design issue both in the business, educational and home office environment, and obviously in the living room environment where the HTPC’s are claiming a bright future. Consequentially novel cooling solutions fitting diverse application needs of future computers is an urgent need.

”The investment will make it possible to expand our organization on a global scale starting with a Silicon Valley based office in Q1 2006 where we will establish and strengthen sales and product marketing. We need to be closer to our key customers” Says Mr. Eriksen and finish off by stating that asetek will engage 25 new employees within Europe, US and Asia during the upcoming time.

The round was led by Northzone Ventures, a leading Nordic early stage ICT hands-on investor with almost 10 year tenure developing companies such as Stepstone, Pricerunner, Funcom and Nextgentel. The round was shared with Vaekstfonden, the largest early stage investor in Denmark that takes a global approach in developing emerging high-growth companies.

“asetek has built a solid brand as the preferred choice in high performance cooling systems. We believe that asetek is in an ideal position to map into the emerging Small Form Factor trend in computing”, says Soren Christensen, Venture Partner in Vaekstfonden. “We are committed to working with asetek in building a global presence”.