SynapSense Gets $10 Million Funding

SynapSense Corporation, a start-up that provides wireless instrumentation systems for data center management, has raised $10 million in Series B financing, the company said today. SynapSense will use the cash to expand its operations and hire staff to market its data center products. The funding was led by Emerald Technology Ventures, and involved existing SynapSense investors including American River Ventures, Nth Power and DFJ Frontier.

SynapSense also has launched its Wireless Green Data Center Solution, which lets data center operators monitor energy use and cooling conditions through a network of sensors managed by a wireless network.

There's nothing particularly "green" about wireless technology, but equipment monitoring will be of critical importance as companies optimize their data centers to be more energy-efficient. Data collection is essential to measuring progress and return on investment (ROI) in data center consolidations and virtualization projects, while temperature data from throughout the facility is a key tool in optimizing a data center's cooling. The lack of instrumentation has been cited as making it difficult to calculate potential ROI on different approaches in data centers.

SynapSense was launched in spring 2006 by Intel veteran Peter Van Deventer and Raju Pandey, a computer scientist at University of California Davis. The Folsom, Calif. firm raised $2 million in a first-round investment in May 2006.

SynapSense builds its solutions using low-power, low-data-rate battery powered radio devices. These devices, which contain a battery, microcontroller, standardized radio and often a MEMS-based sensor, can efficiently collect and transmit data. The company says its technology is being used at the Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, and is being evaluated by IBM Global Services.

"Wireless sensors will have a huge impact on the way we see our environment