Phaidra’s AI platform radically enables the industrial sector to improve resource efficiency via self-learning control systems
Phaidra has closed $25M in Series A funding, the company announced. The funding will allow Phaidra to accelerate the deployment of its technology in mission-critical industries, from data centres and refineries to pharmaceutical plants and steel mills.
To head its growth and business development efforts, Phaidra also announced the addition of industry veteran Robert Locke as president and chief strategy officer. Robert previously was senior vice president of corporate development for automation giant Johnson Controls, where he worked closely with many of JCI’s largest customers, led the creation of new businesses and JCI’s corporate venture capital team, and sourced strategic acquisitions.
“At DeepMind, my co-founders and I saw first-hand how deep reinforcement learning was creating breakthroughs in multiple real-world applications. We started Phaidra to bring the benefits of this technology beyond the tech companies to the industrial sector. Robert’s company-building expertise and the Series A raise will go a long way towards achieving our mission of radical resource efficiency,” said Jim Gao, CEO, Phaidra.
Phaidra’s AI platform radically enables the industrial sector to improve resource efficiency via self-learning control systems. From data centres to pharmaceutical manufacturing to district cooling, Fortune 100 companies are using Phaidra to control complex industrial systems like large chiller plants to reduce their energy consumption by 15-30 per cent while improving thermal stability by up to 70 per cent. Despite these facilities being highly optimised, Phaidra’s technology has unlocked further double-digit performance improvements as its AI identifies opportunities humans cannot see.
Phaidra’s AI optimises plant performance in real-time by continuously learning and adapting to changing plant conditions. This increases profitability, efficiency, and process stability for Phaidra’s industrial customers — while reducing emissions.
Phaidra’s founders have years of experience working on transforming the industrial sector. Gao and CTO Vedavyas Panneershelvam previously led Google DeepMind’s energy and climate efforts, reducing Google’s data centre cooling energy usage by 40 per cent with an AI-based control system. COO Katherine Hoffman is a veteran of the defence and controls industries, where she specialises in new technology commercialisation and controls system design.
The core of Phaidra’s technology is deep reinforcement learning, a technique pioneered by DeepMind to drive several recent scientific breakthroughs, from AlphaGo (an AI-based world-class player of the game “Go”) to protein folding. Panneershelvam is a renowned expert on reinforcement learning and was a core member of the AlphaGo team. The new funding round is led by Starshot Capital, a venture firm which supports high-impact, high-growth companies, particularly those addressing climate change.
Starshot is joined by problem-solving organisation Helena, a new major investor. Other investors include Ahren Innovation Capital and Mustafa Suleyman. Existing investors Flying Fish, Section 32, and Character participated in the round.
