Arctic Sand Technologies, Inc., a fabless semiconductor company transforming power management in electronic devices, today announced that it closed $9.6 million in Series A financing at year-end 2012. A syndicate of financial investors-including Arsenal Venture Partners, Northwater Capital and Ray Stata, and strategic investors, including Dialog Semiconductor and Energy Technology Ventures (ETV, a joint venture involving ConocoPhillips, GE and NRG Energy, Inc.)-awarded the funding to the MIT spin-off, which is commercializing energy-efficient power-conversion chips for multiple markets.

Arctic Sand's technology platform targets the $10 billion total available market for DC-to-DC power-conversion chips, used today to convert power inside the devices for telecom, datacom, industrial and mobility markets. The Arctic Sand Transformative Integrated Power Solutions (TIPS™) platform offers significant improvements over existing products, reducing energy loss by 50% via solutions a fraction the size of competitive products.

"A staggering 80% of energy generated worldwide is lost as heat due to power-conversion losses," said Nadia Shalaby, PhD, CEO and co-founder, Arctic Sand. "Such excessive power inefficiency results in both unnecessary electricity expenses and significantly oversized distribution and generation in serving the world's rapidly expanding computing and data storage needs."

Dr. Shalaby explained that data centers alone spend more than $50 billion annually on electricity-while emitting more CO2 than the entire airline industry. "Arctic Sand's mission is to help rectify that problem," she explained. "By cutting power-conversion losses in half and delivering a smaller solution size within the end products, Arctic Sand's technology empowers device manufacturers to recover energy and space-satisfying the increased functionality demands of their customers. Backed by our financial and strategic investors, we are excited to commercialize technology that will deliver energy savings worldwide."

Industry Support

Arctic Sand Chairman of the Board John Major-a board director at Broadcom, who has extensive industry experience as former chairman of Broadcom and former CTO of Motorola-voiced his confidence in the promising start-up: "Arctic Sand's prominent investment syndicate, differentiating IP and world-class management team lay the ground work for a strong position in the telecom, industrial and mobility markets."

Kevin Skillern, managing director, GE Ventures, shared corporate and industry perspectives on Arctic Sand's value proposition: "GE has a long history as both a supplier and user of power electronics technology and has expanded its power electronics business significantly over the past few years," said Skillern. "That expertise helped ETV see how Arctic Sand's innovations can enable better performance, stronger economics and reduced environmental impact in a wide variety of applications."

Mark Tyndall, vice president of business development and corporate strategy, Dialog Semiconductor, commented on Arctic Sand's promise: "In the mobility markets in which we play, the combination of enhanced energy efficiency with space and cost savings is the perfect mix," said Tyndall. "Arctic Sand's power-conversion platform delivers all of the above, enabling technological advancements unparalleled in the industry today."

About Arctic Sand

Founded in 2011, Arctic Sand Technologies is a privately held, fabless semiconductor company, spun out of MIT, based in Cambridge, Mass. The company's power-conversion platform has the potential to transform power management in electronic devices.

Arctic Sand has already earned numerous prestigious industry recognitions, including the 2011 NASA Game Changer Award, the US Department of Energy U-Launch Award and the NREL Industry Growth Forum Grand Prize Award. The company is also the recipient of the National Science Foundation's Small Business Innovation Research Phase 1 grant.