AI is booming, and so is its appetite for electricity. Global data centre energy use is projected to double by 2028, driven largely by AI workloads, but California startup Refiant thinks it has a smarter solution: to make AI itself drastically more efficient.
The company has raised $5 million in seed funding, led by climate-focused VoLo Earth Ventures, to scale its nature-inspired algorithms, which compress massive AI models without significant loss in performance. In recent tests, Refiant compressed a 120-billion-parameter model to run on a standard MacBook Pro with 12GB of RAM, slashing energy use by over 80% compared to conventional data centre setups.
“Most solutions today focus on building bigger data centres,” says Sid Gutta, Co-Founder. “We’re taking the opposite approach: make AI smarter, smaller, and greener.”
Efficiency Meets Impact
Refiant’s method isn’t just a technical feat. It could transform the economics and environmental footprint of AI. The startup’s compressed models retain 95-99% of original accuracy, allowing multiple models to run on a single machine, drastically reducing electricity consumption. The implications extend beyond cost savings: organisations in regions without large data centres could run powerful AI locally, improving both energy efficiency and data sovereignty.
Google’s recent TurboQuant algorithm highlights the same trend, but Refiant achieves comparable results independently, using nature-inspired optimisation rather than brute-force scaling, according to Dr Viroshan Naicker, Co-Founder.
Here’s Why Investors Are Excited
For VoLo Earth Ventures, the appeal was clear: “AI’s biggest limit isn’t demand, it’s energy,” says Joseph Goodman, Managing Partner. “Refiant has found a fundamentally more efficient way to compute – one that could make AI sustainable at scale.”
The funding will expand Refiant’s team, including engineers from Google Cloud, NASA and Cambridge, and accelerate enterprise partnerships to integrate its energy-saving AI across industries. With efficiency, sustainability and performance all in one package, Refiant is showing that green AI isn’t just possible. Now, it’s commercially viable.
