TDK Ventures
Canvas Category Consultancy : Company : Venture Capital
TDK Ventures is a corporate venture capital firm investing globally in early-stage tech startups – Impact Scaling entrepreneurs who are creating a new era of sustainability and social value.
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Why We Invested in pH7 Technologies to Support Green Metals for Energy Transition
pH7 Technologies has developed a sustainable, proprietary closed-loop extraction method that operates at low temperatures, addressing the challenges faced in metal recycling and mining. With a PGM recycling pilot operating daily and a commercial plant soon to come online, pH7’s process consumes 84% less energy, 98% less water, and produces no NOx and SOx emissions compared to existing extraction approaches. The innovative PGM extraction platform offered by pH7 has numerous advantages over traditional pyrometallurgy processes. It eliminates the need for toxic or hazardous reagents, is capable of handling PGM substrates with high melting points such as SiC, Zr, Ti, and fluorinated compounds, and boasts an impressive recovery rate and purity. Furthermore, the scalability of the process, facilitated by fast reaction kinetics, simple process flow, accessible reagents, and no aqueous discharge, has caught the attention of major PGM catalyst manufacturers, traders, and recyclers, who have signed commercial agreements to supply substantial quantities of end-of-life PGMs to pH7 for treatment.
TDK Ventures is proud to have invested in pH7 Technologies, as the company aligns perfectly with our investment criteria and strategic outlook.
Agritech startup Fasal raises $12 million in funding led by TDK Ventures, British International Investment
Agritech startup Fasal on Friday said it has raised about $12 million (Rs 100 crore) in a funding round led by TDK Ventures and British International Investment (BII).
Fasal claims farmers on its network have reduced irrigation water consumption by 82.8 billion litres, pesticide reduction by 127,426 kilograms, curbed greenhouse gas emissions by 54,965 metric tons, and increased yields and quality by up to 30%.
“With this capital infusion, we plan to expand Fasal’s presence from 75,000 acres to 500,000 acres and enable our technology to deliver more to the farmers by providing them access to sustainable crop inputs, farm-level crop insurance, and working ..
Nubis Adds New Investors to Accelerate Volume Ramp of ML/AI Optics
Nubis Communications, Inc. announced today it has accepted additional strategic investors, bringing total investment in the company to over $50 million. The company emerged from stealth in February 2023 with the first optical engine optimized from the ground up for the demanding requirements of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (ML/AI) cluster interconnect. Nubis recently welcomed new investors Ericsson Ventures and TDK Ventures to accelerate Nubis’ transition to high volume manufacturing in 2024.
Nubis’ technology enables a new class of high-density optical inter-connect (HDI/O) supporting full-duplex edge I/O edge densities in the 1 Tbps/mm range, very low power at 6 pJ/bit or less and standard operation in Linear Drive mode enabling the elimination of optical DSPs, saving latency, cost and power. With Large Language Model sizes growing 1,000x over the past 3 years to 175 billion parameters in GPT-3 and now to over 1.5 trillion parameters in GPT-4, data center operators are struggling to build ML/AI networks large enough to perform training and inference on these models. To support the growth of these very large ML/AI clusters, which are projected to grow from 1K xPUs to 64K over the next few years, much of the interconnect inside the data center will become optical. Nubis optics create distance-independence, connecting multiple cards within a rack and multiple pods across the datacenter, so they perform as if all the processors are on the same card.
Stellarator Fusion Company, Type One Energy Group, Raises $29 Million in First Financing, Appointing Christofer Mowry as CEO
Type One Energy announced the close of an over-subscribed $29 million financing round. This effort launches the company’s ambitious, partner-rich and capital-efficient FusionDirect program to commercialize its stellarator fusion technology. Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV), TDK Ventures and Doral Energy Tech Ventures co-led the round with additional cleantech investment from Darco, the Grantham Foundation, MILFAM, Orbia Ventures, Shorewind Capital, TRIREC, VAHOCA and others.
Type One Energy’s technical foundations provide a powerful springboard to achieve its mission. Founded by several of the world’s leading stellarator experts, Type One Energy also brings concentrated experience from renowned fusion science institutions, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the U.S., the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Germany and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for its work on advanced magnet technology. The stellarator is a fusion technology characterized by inherently stable and steady-state operations. Related to tokamaks, stellarators do not, however, require massive circulating electric currents to assist in creating the magnetic fields used to confine their fusion plasma. This makes stellarator technology less physically complex and easier to translate into a practical fusion power plant.