Engineering startup Corintis wins the Top100 Swiss Startup Award 2025

Last year's runner-up is this year's winner. Founded in 2022 by Remco van Erp (CEO) and Sam Harrison (COO), the EPFL spin-off delivers silicon-based microfluidic cooling that extracts 10x more heat from chips and operates 50x more efficiently than conventional methods.

For the 15th time, a jury of 100 investors and technology experts has selected the 100 most promising startups in Switzerland. Corintis is the winner of the Top100 Swiss Startup Award 2025. The project idea started in 2022 with the support of Venture Kick and the founders presented their startup to international investors with the Venture Leaders. Today, the company employs 50 people and provides microfluid-based cooling systems to semiconductors for efficient cooling.

On its way to becoming a key supplier to the global semiconductor industry
For decades, Moore’s Law set the pace: it states that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles approximately every 18 to 24 months. However, for about 15 years, the reality has been lagging behind the law. In addition to undesirable quantum effects and exploding production costs, increasing heat generation has slowed down chip development. Cooling all data centers worldwide consumes as much electricity as the cities of New York and London combined.

And heat is generated in ever smaller spaces: the entire annual production of Nvidia, the leading manufacturer of AI chips, could soon fit into 5,000 m2, almost the size of a football pitch.

“Traditional air cooling of chips is reaching its limits,” explains Remco van Erp, co-founder and CEO of Lausanne-based engineering startup Corintis. The alternative is liquid cooling and manufacturers such as Nvidia, Intel and AMD, and cloud operators Amazon, Google and Microsoft are increasingly turning to cold plates: copper plates that conduct a cooling fluid to the chips via microcapillaries.

Since January, Corintis has been shipping entire pallets of cold plates to the US, where most of its large customers are located. A unique selling point is driving the Swiss startup’s business: Corintis’ cooling plates are not off-the-shelf products, but are tailored precisely to the chip’s layout. The software models the heat development in a microchip and predicts the hot spots and the amount of heat generated.

But Corintis’ topology software has further potential: “We want to integratethe microcapillaries with the coolingfluid into the chips,” says van Erp. He was able to secure a hyperscaler for thepilot project: “Together with a US-based hyperscaler, we have succeeded in proving the feasibility of integrated cooling.” Experts are calling this agame changer. It is estimated that integrated cooling would consume up to 50 times less electricity than traditional airconditioning.

The road to industrialization is long, but one thing is certain: if Corintis implements its cooling concept, the EPFL spin-off will become a key supplier tothe global semiconductor industry, a sector that generated sales of almost USD 700 billion in 2024 and which is growing at a double-digit rate.

Corintis’ investors believe in it: late last year, an international consortium provided CHF 20 million in growth capital. The financing round also saw a sensational new addition to Corintis’ board of directors: Lip-Bu Tan, who has been CEO of Intel since mid-March.

A lot has happened since van Erp started his doctorate at EPFL’s Powerand Wide-band-gap Electronics Re-search Laboratory in 2018. Two years later, he met Sam Harrison, then product manager at Astrocast (Top100Startup 2018/2019), over an after-work beer, and in February 2022, they joined forces. They now have more than 50 employees.

The team’s work on a new manufacturing technology will remove a major obstacle to the development of newchips. "With our technology," says vanErp, "heat generation will no longer bea problem."

Jordi Montserrat (Venturelab), Patrick Forte (UBS), Remco van Erp (Corintis), and Stefan Steiner (Venturelab)

This article by Jost Dubacher was first published in the Top100 Swiss Startup Magazine 2025.