Founder (CEO) - Elemental Sensing for AI Data Center Cooling

Who We Are

ATUM is a Singapore deep-tech venture builder and investor. We build companies from breakthrough, IP-backed research, bringing capital, operational muscle, and partners from industry, VC, and government into every build. We've built and backed 15 ventures, and we invest in fast-scaling deep-tech with real fundamentals, not hype.

The Venture

Liquid cooling is fast becoming the backbone of the AI data center, and the coolant running through it is now mission-critical. Yet the fluid is still watched the way it was decades ago: a sample sent to a lab, once a quarter, or after something has already failed. Corrosion doesn't creep evenly either. It jumps when a loop gets topped up with the wrong fluid or an inhibitor runs down, and quarterly sampling finds the damage months later with no way to trace the cause.

We're building the company to change that.

The core is an inline coolant-monitoring platform, developed at NTU, that uses laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy to read the coolant in real time, identifying and quantifying the dissolved metals that signal corrosion, down to which component is degrading and how fast. The optical monitors entering the market today read the fluid indirectly; this one measures the metals directly, which they cannot.

The first market is coolant monitoring for data center operators, where a reliability gap is opening fast as the industry shifts to direct liquid cooling and no inline elemental product yet exists. A corporate partner in data centre cooling is already engaged. The science works and the technology is early. It's a platform-led deep-tech company at the centre of the AI infrastructure build-out, with a clear path to category leadership.

The Role

You'll be the founding CEO. You own the commercial side of the business: who buys this, what they pay for it, how it gets sold, and how the company gets funded.

Your founding CTO is already in place. He spent four years in US designing optical sensing hardware for consumer products shipped in the tens of millions, and led national-scale hardware deployment for the Singapore government. A laser and photonics specialist from another ATUM venture is advising on the optical build. The NTU inventors stay on as technical advisors, alongside a dedicated ATUM venture team.

Together, we'll:

• Turn early operator interest into paid pilots, then into repeatable contracts
• Set the product positioning and pricing, and build the business case that gets a data center operator to approve the spend
• Raise pre-seed and seed capital alongside the CTO and ATUM
• Open up the channels: colocation and hyperscale operators, cooling OEMs, and their service partners

This is not a job. It's a founding journey where you share the risk, the upside, and the impact.

• B2B sales track record: You've sold technical products or infrastructure to industrial, data center, energy, or process customers. Long sales cycles, several people in the room, and you carried the number.
• New product sales: You've sold something new, something the customer wasn't buying before, and built the business case to get it approved internally.
• Comfortable with hardware: You understand pilots, deployment costs, service models, and what it takes to go from one site to fifty. You can hold your own with engineers without being one.
• Resilient & ready: You have the runway to commit full-time, and you know building deep-tech hardware takes grit, iteration, and patience. You don't need to be Singapore-based, though you'll need to be here often.

Bonus

• Existing relationships with data centre operators, colocation providers, or cooling OEMs. Not required, but it would help.

Why Build With Us

• A real starting point: Working science, a corporate partner engaged, and a CTO already building. Not a blank page.
• Founder-led: You're the CEO, with meaningful founding equity.
• Straight talk on money: There's no salary at the start. ATUM funds the pre-seed and we have accelerated access to Singapore government grants, which together fund the early build. Salary comes when the seed round closes. You'll need runway to bridge that, and we'd rather say so now than three conversations in.
• Funding-ready: ATUM backs the build with pre-seed capital and grant access, plus follow-on funding from our investor network.
• Hands-on partners: We're in the trenches with you on product, GTM, and fundraising, not just on the cap table.
• Domain access: Labs, technical experts, early adopters, and an ecosystem already engaged.