No Priors Ep. 93 | With Akash Systems' Felix Ejeckam and Ty Mitchell

Welcome to No Priors. Today, I'm chatting with Felix Ajekum and Ty Mitchell, the founders of Akash Systems, which makes diamond-based cooling technology for computing platforms, from space satellites to AI data centers. Their innovation uses highly conductive diamond to help computers run cooler and faster while using less energy. Felix and Ty, welcome to No Priors.

Good to be here.

Thank you, Sarah.

I think we should start with just a quick introduction as to what Akash is.

Sure. Um, again, very good to be here with you, Sarah. Uh, Akash Systems, we are a venture-backed company based in the Bay Area that is starting from the ground up at the material science level, and we are making, using proprietary materials, materials specifically of diamond that we grow in the lab, using it to make electronic systems that are disruptive in the world, by an order of magnitude. Um, it's in contrast, oftentimes when we start companies, even in the hardware space, we tend to, uh, start injecting ourselves in the middle of a supply chain. At Akash, as material scientists, we come in at the periodic table level, uh, and we start there to build up, uh, chips, boards, systems that ultimately change the lives of our society, whether you're in business or as a consumer. Um, and we do that in several ways. Um, we change the structure of a basic material. Uh, the systems that we've chosen to affect, uh, we started off in the space world where we make some of the fastest satellite radios ever made by humans. Uh, and then we go over, as we are doing now, to AI, where we are able to cause compute, uh, a, a GPU to go faster than has ever been done before since the beginning of, of this, this, uh, this new space, uh, or reducing energy consumption in the data center by a significant amount, all because of innovative material science that we've pioneered at the ground floor.

So maybe that's a good segue into, uh, how you got started working on this, because you've had this idea for a long time. As you said, you started on, um, uh, space applications earlier. Can you talk a little bit about your background and, you know, the original scientific idea and how you thought it would be applied?

Sure. Uh, so my background is in material science and electrical engineering. I obtained a PhD in electrical engineering with a minor in material science and device physics from Cornell. Uh, and in my PhD, uh, I focused on bringing together very dissimilar materials, uh, s- in such a way that one plus one equals 10, okay? Uh, and, and, you know, for example, silicon, very well-known, ubiquitous material that's ushered in the current modern era that we have today. Uh, but then there are other materials, plastics, other types of semiconductors, that don't actually do as well as silicon, but they have their own strengths. Um, and so for my PhD, I looked at ways of trying to bring together, say, the optics world with electronics, silicon, and merging them together as such that the overall system is incredibly powerful. That philosophy I've brought, uh, to Akash, uh, when I started Akash with Ty in 2017 to try to do the same thing, um, I've often found personally, uh... And actually it's, I think it's a very good, good metaphor for, for, for humans, how we interact with, together. When you bring different people that have different strengths, the combination can be incredibly powerful in ways that excel and exceed the simple summation of the parts. Uh, and that's exactly what we do at Akash, where we bring, uh, artificial diamonds, well-known as the most thermally conductive material ever grown in nature or ever to occur in nature, and then silicon, or even gallium nitride, and quite frankly, any other semiconductor. When brought together, amazing things happen. Um, very happy and excited about doing that in the, in the world of AI. Uh, we did that in space, uh, where we have now made and launched, uh, s- the fastest radios ever made by, by, by man. Uh, and now with, uh, AI, we're able to, to achieve, uh, performance levels, whether in energy, uh, efficiency levels or, or compute speeds, uh, ever obtained by simply using these, these artificial materials, uh, that we've created in the lab.