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Leaders
May 2020 www.intellinews.com I Page 7
is needed to improve grid resiliency and enable the high renewables power system of the future.”
In an interlinked story, big data is already a massive energy user, consuming more electricity each year than the UK, and by 2040 is set to account for 40% of the world’s total energy consumption, making it the single biggest energy consumer.
Tachyum, whose CEO and co-founder Radoslav Danilak Bocek dubs the “Steve Jobs of the semiconductor chips industry”, has developed Prodigy, the first universal processor that will reach mass production next year.
The next part of the plan is to scale up that investment into building a network of data centres in Europe starting in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. These will be powered by the Tachyum chip, which would help to address the huge energy consumption bill from big data by creating low-cost and high efficiency data centres.
“We are looking to take the power efficiency and the chip that is ten times less energy intensive than traditional chips, and migrate it into an infrastructure fixed asset that will provide a valuable resource that is very much needed ... Tachyum-powered data centres could be the answer to the biggest burner of electricity on the planet,” says Bocek.
Finally, InoBat and Wildcat Discovery Technologies are in the electro-mobility field, which is set to achieve massive growth in the coming decades
as drivers shift from fossil-fuel powered vehicles to EVs. Like renewables and data processing, this is a huge growth area. OPEC estimates there will be 240mn EVs by 2040, up from the current 3mn, all of which will need batteries. Bocek forecasts a total addressable market for batteries of €150bn, of which “we would love to have at least 10%”.
Venture with a difference
While IPM has made venture capital-style investments into ESS, InoBat, Tachyum and Wildcat, Bocek stresses that it is not a typical
venture investor. Specifically, while most venture capital firms hedge their risks by spreading
their investments among a range of companies, in the hope at least one of them will deliver big returns, IPM has a very hands-on approach that it calls “venture-to-value” in building up the small number of companies it backs.
“We don’t believe in the statistical probabilistic game ... instead we want to invest in companies where we will be in the driving seat along with the founders,” Bocek says.
He considers there are two main reasons why venture capital investments fail: they are unable to reach the customer (for example they don’t manage to convince large state-owned utilities to use their technology), or they are unable to access long-term money.
IPM, meanwhile, tries to act as a bridge between the separate worlds of utilities and venture investment. In addition, by bringing US companies to Europe and creating European joint ventures, they are “Europeanising” companies and thus allowing them to get access to new sources of finance from national and EU-level institutions.
“This is a unique model because by giving access to big customers and long-term non-diluted money, we give the companies breathing room to develop the product they need to sell large off-take volumes to big customers,” Bocek comments.
From Silicon Valley to Danube Valley
Another key plank of what IPM does is bringing technologies to the region that Bocek, who hails from Slovakia, dubs the Danube Valley, spanning the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia.
Tachyum was the latest to move into the region, announcing on April 7 that it has opened new offices in Slovakia as its business in the EU grows. The move will give Tachyum a foothold in the “strategically important European marketplace”, as well as enabling it to leverage the technological expertise of its Slovakian employees, the company said.