Why We Invested in HEXAspec:
High Performance h-BN Composite Materials for Semiconductor Packaging
By Camille Little and Kent Lucas
Look inside any modern AI chip and you'll find the most advanced engineering on the planet, sealed inside a material that's barely changed in decades. That casing does its job well, protecting the chip from moisture and damage. It was never designed to let heat escape. Today, that's become one of the biggest problems in computing.
AI chips now draw as much power as a microwave, nonstop. When they overheat, they slow down to protect themselves, and data centers spend fortunes on fans, liquid cooling, and water to fight back. All of that works from the outside in.
HEXAspec starts at the source, by rethinking the casing itself. The company works with boron nitride, a white mineral powder you can find in some cosmetics. It moves heat about as well as metal does, but it doesn't conduct electricity, which is exactly what you want sitting next to a chip. The catch is that it only works this way when it's peeled into ultra-thin sheets, and doing that reliably at scale has been out of reach. HEXAspec's process, developed in Professor Jun Lou's lab at Rice University, makes it practical. The result is a packaging material that pulls heat out of a chip more than ten times better than what's used today.
Better materials already exist, so performance alone isn't why we invested. Our reason is that HEXAspec's material doesn't ask anyone to change how they work. Exotic options like diamond composites require chipmakers to rebuild production lines, so they get admired and set aside. HEXAspec's compound runs on the equipment packaging houses already own. That turns adoption into a purchasing decision instead of a capital project. It costs a few dollars per chip and could unlock thousands of dollars in value per chip each year.
We also know this team. We met Tianshu years ago, when HEXAspec was still a lab project, and we watched the company take shape before we wrote a check. What stood out over that time was how they grew. They took hard feedback, came back sharper, and built real relationships across an industry that doesn't open its doors easily. Today they're in technical conversations with names like TSMC, Micron, and SK Hynix, and they're part of NVIDIA's Inception program.
There's a long road ahead. Chipmakers are careful, and testing new materials takes time. But the problem is urgent, the science is real, and nobody has to rebuild a factory to say yes. That's why we led HEXAspec's pre-seed round, and why we think they're the team to help chips beat the heat.
