Insider Brief
- Phaidra raised over $50M in Series B funding led by Collaborative Fund, with participation from NVIDIA, Sony Innovation Fund, Index Ventures, and others, to make AI factories more energy-efficient using AI agents.
- The company builds intelligent control systems that optimize power, cooling, and workload management in large-scale data centers, maximizing computing output per watt of energy.
- Founded by ex-Google DeepMind engineers, Phaidra partners with NVIDIA to develop AI agents that cut costs, boost efficiency, and reduce the environmental footprint of next-generation AI infrastructure.
PRESS RELEASE — Phaidra, the company building AI agents for AI factories, announced a Series B funding round of more than $50 million led by Collaborative Fund, with participation from Helena, Index Ventures, NVIDIA, Sony Innovation Fund, and others. The funding will be used to make AI factories — the data center infrastructure purpose-built for AI workloads — radically more resource-efficient via AI agents.
At the heart of this mission lies a simple truth: we live in an energy-constrained world. Our ability to generate intelligence, and therefore revenue, is fundamentally limited by the energy available to power these grid-scale computing systems. We must therefore maximize the tokens generated by every watt of energy that enters the AI factory.
This in turn requires careful orchestration of the complex power, cooling, and workload management systems that underpin modern AI factories. Historically, these systems are designed and operate independently with minimal coordination, leading to large inefficiencies. In a world where every watt is precious, this waste is unacceptable. These systems must operate seamlessly as a single integrated system of compute.
Phaidra addresses this challenge by building AI agents to optimize large-scale compute facilities. Today, the company collaborates with industry leaders like NVIDIA to design the next generation of AI infrastructure. Phaidra is developing a portfolio of AI agents — from liquid cooling to chiller plants to workload management — that are trained to orchestrate complex systems that exceed the capability of human intuition or hard-coded controls logic, thereby unlocking efficiency gains that were previously unobtainable.
“Every breakthrough in AI requires an equally ambitious breakthrough in infrastructure efficiency,” said Jim Gao, CEO of Phaidra. “Our technology enables AI data centers to run smarter, not just harder, cutting costs while dramatically reducing their environmental footprint.”
“Collaborative Fund has always believed that the most transformative companies are those that marry profit with purpose,” said Sophie Bakalar, Partner at Collaborative Fund. “Phaidra is tackling AI’s biggest bottleneck, energy consumption, in collaboration with NVIDIA, the global leader in compute.”
With the new capital, Phaidra will accelerate development of its agent ecosystem, deepen its collaboration with NVIDIA, and expand to additional global operators.
About Phaidra
Phaidra builds intelligent control systems for the world’s most complex industrial facilities. By combining reinforcement learning and domain expertise, Phaidra helps operators achieve unprecedented levels of efficiency, reliability, and sustainability.
The company was founded by Jim Gao, who previously led Google DeepMind’s industrial AI efforts; Vedavyas Panneershelvam, a primary engineer on AlphaGo; and Katherine Hoffman, an operations leader with experience at Trane and Raytheon. Together, they launched Phaidra to bring cutting-edge AI into real-world infrastructure at a moment when the energy demands of AI itself are skyrocketing.
For more information, visit www.phaidra.ai
Featured image: Phaidra leaders, from left: CTO Vedavyas Panneershelvam, CEO Jim Gao, and COO Katherine Hoffman. Credit: Phaidra
