Empower Announces a $45 Million Series C1 Financing to Fund Global Expansion and Development of Next-Generation Semiconductors

Oct 26, 2021 | Press Release

Financing accelerates adoption of integrated voltage regulators (IVRs) that minimize the energy footprint of the digital economy

Milpitas, Calif., October 26th, 2021 — Empower Semiconductor, the world leader in Integrated Voltage Regulators (IVRs), has closed a $45 million equity financing led by Mesh Ventures and including existing investors Samsung Catalyst Fund, Hallador and Regal I. The financing will further accelerate the global expansion of its sales force and operational footprint as well as fund development of its next generation integrated voltage regulator (Empower IVR™) semiconductor technology. 

Edward Chyau, Managing Partner at Mesh Ventures, said: “We are excited to partner with Empower, a company that will transform how data centers, communication networks and mobile devices are powered. The environmental footprint of the digital economy is growing dramatically, and innovative deep tech companies like Empower are the key to growing sustainably. Empower’s technology will enable higher and higher data rates and processing speeds while offering unprecedented levels of system efficiency and density.”

Empower recently released its first generation IVR into mass production after nearly six years in development. By moving voltages and currents up to 1,000x faster than any competitor, Empower’s technology offers dramatic energy savings to data centers that previously would not have been possible. In fact, it is estimated that adoption of Empower’s technology by the world’s data centers will enable annual electricity savings of up to 285 TWh by 2025 ($32 billion), or 150 million tons of carbon dioxide every year.

Tim Phillips, Empower’s CEO states: “Meeting the performance demands of data-intensive systems while keeping energy use to a minimum demands radical new power management solutions. Empower was founded to deliver those solutions and this latest funding will help us meet growing demand for our technologies by accelerating our product roadmap and production plans with key partners and customers.  We have set a path to make a major impact in a $10 billion segment of the high-performance power management market and we will leverage this investment to execute it.”

About Empower Semiconductor

The exponential increase in the amount of data being communicated and processed around the globe is driving the energy consumption of datacenters and communications networks to 17% of total electricity demand worldwide by 2030(1), dramatically increasing pollution, carbon emissions and cost. Empower Semiconductor was founded with the mission to “minimize the energy footprint of the digital economy” by developing novel fully integrated power management solutions that both increase the performance and reduce power consumption of energy-hungry, data-intensive applications. 

Traditional power solutions require many discrete components with big footprints, complex designs and deliver power inefficiently with poor response times and inaccuracies. Empower Semiconductor’s patented IVR technology integrates dozens of components into a single IC increasing efficiency, shrinking footprints by 10x and delivering power with unprecedented simplicity, speed & accuracy and with zero discrete components. The Empower IVR™ technology solves the power density challenge to address a wide range of applications including mobile, wearables, 5G, AI, and data centers. In 2020 the capacitor technology platform was added to further address power density. E-CAP revolutionized the capacitor industry as the world’s smallest, highest performing, and incredibly reliable capacitor for wearables, mobile, and SoC applications. The company is based in Silicon Valley, CA and is led by a team of highly experienced power experts and executives.

  • Nature, “How to stop data centres from gobbling up the world’s electricity”, September 12, 2018

Empower Semiconductor and the Empower logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Empower Semiconductor, Inc. All other brands, product names and marks are or may be trademarks or registered trademarks used to identify products or services of their respective owners.