Modular data center startup Flexnode has raised $8.85 million in a Series A round.
The Bethesda-based company told DCInno that San Francisco's Zacua Ventures led the investment.
"This took some time," CEO Andrew Lindsey told the publication. "Really, all the capital we've raised is strategic, so we found out who we would ultimately be working with to scale this out, and we brought them in from a capital raise perspective to further enable that process."
The investment comes after the company won a $3.5m grant from the Department of Energy as part of the COOLERCHIPS program. For ARPA-E, it will develop a prefabricated, modularly designed Edge data center with a novel manifold microchannel heatsink, a chassis-based hybrid immersion cooling approach, an additive manufacturing-enabled dry cooling heat exchanger system, and a topology-optimized container housing the entire system.
Lindsey told DCInno that it expects the first of its modular facilities to come online later this year. The data centers can go from four rack configurations to 36 rack ones.
"If you have a group that has existing long leads, electrical supply chain infrastructure in place, we can have something in place overnight," Lindsey said.
"But if you want us to go into a greenfield location and want to build from scratch, there's a process that we're going to go through just like every other building company around, things like permitting, planning, and zoning. We certainly won't just drop our data centers in there like the Bird scooters."
