Sydney cooling startup Enaxiom raises $A2.5m seed led by Epic Angels

Sydney climate-tech startup Enaxiom has closed an oversubscribed US$1.8 million (A$2.5 million) seed round led by Singapore-based investment collective Epic Angels, the company said on Wednesday. The founders plan to commercialise a regenerative cooling system pitched at AI data centres dealing with tighter water budgets.

The round lifts Enaxiom's total funding to US$2.7 million (A$3.7 million) since the company's 2023 founding in Sydney. Antler and BlackNova joined as co-investors. Founders Tia Collings, the chief executive, and Bijan Rahimi, the chief technology officer, plan to use the capital to scale headcount and accelerate a US expansion aimed at hyperscaler data-centre operators, the company said in its funding announcement.

Enaxiom's product, HydroCool, sits at what the founders describe as the heat rejection layer of a data centre's cooling stack. It is designed to operate alongside direct-to-chip and immersion cooling, runs on non-potable water including recycled wastewater, and recovers high-quality water as a by-product, according to the system description circulated to investors. A 40kW pilot has been independently engineering-validated, the company said. The patent reflects roughly a decade of prior research, according to a briefing reported by trade publication Asia Tech Daily.

"As AI infrastructure scales, the real constraint is shifting from compute to energy and water. We're building cooling infrastructure that tackles this at the heat rejection layer," Collings said in the announcement. Rahimi described the commercialisation plan in modular terms. "We're not scaling by building bigger systems. We're scaling by repeating a proven unit," he said in comments reported by Asia Tech Daily.

Water consumption by US data centres reached 17.4 billion gallons in 2023, according to figures cited in the funding announcement. The figure is forecast to climb to between 38 billion and 73 billion gallons by 2028 as AI training workloads expand cooling demand. Hyperscalers running facilities in Sydney and Melbourne face a similar trajectory. Cooling typically accounts for the bulk of non-IT load at large evaporative-tower sites.

Epic Angels, a collective of more than 850 female investors with portfolios across the Asia-Pacific and Latin America, framed the cheque as a sustainability-infrastructure bet. The collective invests across technology, climate and consumer sectors. "Data centers are one of the defining infrastructure challenges of our time, and water is rapidly becoming as critical a constraint as energy," founding partner Maaike Doyer said. "We invest now to change the problems of the future. That's the whole point."

Enaxiom has not disclosed customer commitments or a post-money valuation. Collings said deployment work would target hyperscaler and colocation operators in Australia and the United States over the coming year. The startup is recruiting for thermodynamics and field-engineering roles, the company said.

Antler, the global early-stage backer, did not disclose its cheque size. BlackNova, a Sydney-based deep-tech fund, also declined to comment on round mechanics. The Asia Pacific is now a focal investor area for water-aware data-centre research, according to the Epic Angels disclosure materials.