Accelerate electronics cooling design and simulation

Vanellus is building GPU-accelerated thermal simulation software for electronics cooling design. The company addresses a critical pain point: as chips generate more heat and form factors become more constrained, thermal design errors are increasingly expensive, yet existing tools like Flotherm/Icepak hit performance and accuracy ceilings on complex systems.

Vanellus leverages three key technological shifts: (1) server GPUs now offer order-of-magnitude speedups over CPUs (2) cloud infrastructure enables flexible access to high-performance compute without CAPEX (3) Researchers have identified how to adapt scientific computing algorithms to fully take advantage of GPU computing architectures.

The product combines a finite-volume CFD solver optimized for cloud GPUs, automated meshing, and an intuitive browser-based UI for PCB and CAD integration. This enables thermal engineers to run large parallel simulation campaigns rapidly, accelerating design iteration cycles and reducing reliance on expensive experimental testing.

The founding team brings deep scientific computing expertise: CEO Laurence Cullen (previously ARM), CTO Dr Michael Negus (Oxford PhD, CFD solver developer), and CSO Dr Oscar Holroyd (Warwick PhD, GPU optimization specialist).

Vanellus is currently seeking beta partnerships with companies with electronics cooling design challenges across the automotive, data center, and consumer electronics markets.