Thursday 16th January 2025
The company has developed a liquid cooling system designed to improve energy efficiency and reduce carbon production in data centres
Co-founders of the company: Cathal Wilson, chief operating officer, Anthony Robinson, chief science officer, and Kenneth O’Mahony, chief executive. Nexalus is now bidding for huge global data centre projects. Picture: Cathal Noonan
Nexalus, a Cork-based energy management business, aims to raise €10 million in pre-seed funding this year.
Headquartered in Cork City, the firm was founded by Kenneth O’Mahony, Dr Cathal Wilson and Anthony Robinson in 2018. The business has 10 full-time staff and has raised €6 million to date. Nexalus has developed a liquid cooling system aimed at improving energy efficiency and reducing carbon production in data centres.
“We’re an advanced thermal management company, specialising in liquid cooling. In a nutshell, data centres have engines in the forms of chips like CPUs and GPUs. We look at data centres as heat sources rather than complicated technology,” O’Mahony told the Business Post.
Company Details
Founded by: Kenneth O’Mahony, Dr Cathal Wilson and Anthony Robinson in 2018
Staff: 10
Funding: €6 million
“We’ve designed a patented technology that allows us to improve performance and profitability for data centres while also protecting the planet. They don’t have to do less with more, they do more with less.”
The idea for Nexalus grew out of research by Wilson and Robinson, with O’Mahony having known the duo through his prior work.
“Cathal [Wilson] read an article that said most data centres were still air cooled and he couldn’t understand the logic of that. The three of us got together and got a research grant from Enterprise Ireland. Before we had fully used that funding, we were already operating commercially,” O’Mahony said.
“Finance was my background, working with EMC. After EMC was bought out by Dell, I was going to take a break and play golf. I thought the research for Nexalus would take a bit of time but it rocketed, and my golf game has stayed as miserable as it was then.”
The speed of development for Nexalus may have kept O’Mahony away from the links but it also meant the business was advancing at a pace to be ready for developments in data centre needs.
“We went so fast that before AI was even an everyday term, we were doing a lot of the work on the high end engineering on what was required to manage its CPUs and GPUs,” he said.
The research grant that Nexalus received from Enterprise Ireland was the beginning of what O’Mahony described as a valuable relationship for the business.
“We progressed into the high performance start-up unit [HPSU] and we’ve continued to work with them. Leo Clancy, the soon to be departed chief executive, has been a great supporter of us, and our development advisor has been great as well,” he said.
O’Mahony is bullish on the future for Nexalus and he expects significant growth in the coming year.
“We’ve had a dream start to 2025, we’re bidding for huge global projects. In late December we announced our partnership with HPE and we’re having strong communications with hyperscale data centre businesses, these are the biggest operators in the world like Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon,” he said.
“We plan to raise €10 million in funding this year before going to a full seed round in 2026.”
Source: Business Post