Durham’s Phononic raises an additional $30 million

Phononic, a Durham company that sells solid-state cooling and refrigeration devices, has raised $30 million in new funding to boost its sales and marketing efforts and expand customer and technical support.

Founder and CEO Tony Atti said that the company, which currently has 110 employees, anticipates hiring an additional 20 to 25 workers by mid-2017. Roughly two-thirds of those employees are expected to be located in Durham, where the company has its headquarters and a 20,000-square-foot facility that makes semiconductors and other components.

The latest round of funding boosts the total capital Phononic has raised from investors since it was founded in 2009 to nearly $120 million.

New investors include GGV Capital, which has headquarters in China and Silicon Valley and has $3.8 billion under management, and a group of mostly local individual investors spearheaded by Merrette Moore of Raleigh investment firm Lookout Capital. They joined a roster of existing investors that include Rex Health Ventures, the venture capital arm of Rex Healthcare.

“I feel like the company has made a lot of progress in the last 18 to 20 months in terms of commercializing and getting some customer traction,” said Moore, who personally invested in Phononic.

Moore also said the company has “incredible technology with revolutionary potential.”

Phononic’s solid-state technology can be used to replace mechanical compressors and heat exchange systems that power traditional refrigerators – eliminating moving parts, consuming less energy and operating nearly noise-free in the bargain. Its technology also is used in other cooling applications.

Its portfolio of products include: its own Evolve brand of laboratory and medical refrigerators; its own brand of devices for cooling the CPU, or central processing unit, in gaming and high-performance computer workstations, which began shipping about a month ago; and semiconductor devices that are sold to fiber optics manufacturer that cool the lasers that transmit and receive data in fiber optic networks.

Its technology is also being deployed in a line of home refrigerators and wine chillers that Haier, a Chinese company that is the world’s largest appliance maker, plans to launch in time for the Christmas holiday. The Haier wine chillers are earmarked for the U.S. market, while the refrigerators will be sold in Europe and China.

Phononic doesn’t disclose its revenue, but Atti said that “very strong pre-orders” for a new, larger 5.5- cubic-foot Evolve medical refrigerator that will begin shipping later this month helped drive the latest round of funding.

This story was originally published September 12, 2016 at 6:07 PM with the headline "Durham’s Phononic raises an additional $$30 million."