A data center cooling software startup took home $10,000 at EXPlore: Pittsburgh Tech Week’s second annual pitch competition.
Glacian Technologies won the top prize after pitching alongside four other local startups Monday. The company, founded in January 2026, combines a “digital twin” — a detailed simulation of a data center’s cooling system — with an AI model that proposes ways to run that equipment more efficiently, according to cofounder Jie Zhao.
“Our product is almost ready,” cofounder Jie Zhao told Technical.ly after the win, adding, “The key thing right now for us is customer, customer, customer.”
Fittingly, Glacian signed its first customer earlier that day, according to Zhao’s pitch.
Startups at the competition were judged by four industry experts, including Jason White of JPMorgan Chase, Pradeep Nallathambi of BNY Mellon, Allison Howard of Nollapelli and Matt Marchand of Gecko Robotics.
The other startups that pitched ranged from agtech to new medical interventions, including:
- Orenda: a computational pharmacogenomics startup for brain-disease drug discovery;
- Bright Blossom Technologies: an agtech robotics startup detecting diseases in orchards;
- Peek LLC: a startup building a proprietary algorithm that analyzes early-pregnancy biomarkers and turns them into personalized recommendations to improve health outcomes for both pregnant people and their babies;
- Atra Carbons: a startup aiming to bring acetylene black manufacturing to the US, a material commonly used in lithium-ion batteries.
The other founders didn’t walk away empty-handed, though. Each received a $250 grant for participating. It’s a gesture that represents Tech Week’s motto of “tech meets community,” according to organizer Kenya Porter.
“Being a Pittsburgher, it means a lot that I’m in a position to give back to the city that made me who I am,” Porter told Technical.ly, adding, “I don’t want people to feel that all that preparatory work that they did to prepare for tonight was in vain.”
A startup to meet the moment, over a decade in the making
Glacian’s tech could be a good move for data centers facing backlash over water consumption, according to Zhao.
“We make cooling towers more efficient,” Zhao said. “It also means less water consumption. I think a lot of the new construction data centers that face backlash from communities. This could be a really good solution for those guys.”
Cooling systems also have a significant impact on a data center’s overall energy consumption. They can account for about 40% of total electricity use at a facility, which means there are also opportunities to make existing data centers more energy efficient, Zhao added.
While Glacian seems fit for the moment, the company’s tech has been over a decade in the making.
Cofounder Wangda Zuo has spent over a decade researching the physics models behind Glacian’s core technology. That work has been backed by about $8 million in grants, including from the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Energy, Penn State University and others, according to Zhao.
Glacian’s cofounders met at a conference 13 years ago, when Zuo was a young professor at the University of Miami and Zhao was a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University.
They kept in touch. While Zuo was conducting research, Zhao was helping build New York-based startup Delos. Then, after talking about launching their own venture for a few years, they decided to take the leap late last year.
“We believe data centers are booming,” Zhao said. “We think this is the right timing, so I quit my job.”
