French startup Qarnot bags €6 million Series B for sustainable cloud computing technology that heats buildings and water

Qarnot Computing, a French company developing sustainable high performance computing (HPC), has raised a €6 million Series B round from Banque des Territoires, Caisse des Dépôts, Engie Rassembleur d'Énergies, A/O PropTech, and Groupe Casino. A combination of climate tech and cloud computing, Qarnot sells cloud computing capacity to clients. When its computer servers generate heat, the company redirects that energy to sustainably heat buildings and water. In a press release, the Montrouge-based startup cites that data centres, most of which are owned by big tech companies, consumed about 3 percent of the world’s total energy supply in 2018, an amount equal to the global airline industry. Othmane Zrikem, the chief data officer at A/O PropTech said that Qarnot’s technology “reduces the carbon footprint of computer servers by 78 percent compared to traditional data centre solutions. As the need for HPC continues to grow in many industries (banking, pharmaceutical, 3D animation, etc.) the market for Qarnot will grow substantially in Europe.” So far the company has developed QH-1 computer heaters for buildings, QB-1 digital boilers for water, and QS-1 computing racks for warehouses. The business serves three major French banks: BNP Paribas, Société Générale, and Natixis. Across the country, nearly 1,000 social housing units are heated by Qarnot. Founded in Montrouge in 2010, the company will use the new funding toward “an ambitious recruitment plan”, focusing on IT roles for R&D and commercial roles to diversify the current customer base.