€300k · Pre-Seed · Energy · Innsbruck, Austria
Innsbruck-based Serwas Technologies has raised a €300k pre-seed round led by Gateway Ventures, with business angels from the Pioneers Club and MCI Innsbruck also participating. The financing is the first closing of a round that the company plans to extend in October, according to brutkasten. Serwas will use the capital to expand its first site and prepare deployments in additional buildings.
The Serwas team. Image: Johannes Aitzetmüller / MCI.
Serwas places water-cooled servers inside buildings with steady demand for hot water or heating, such as swimming pools, hotels and care facilities. It sells the available computing capacity to external customers and transfers the servers' heat into the host building's water and heating system. The company operates the equipment and handles its integration, turning one electricity input into two commercial outputs: computing and useful heat.
The company's first AI-compute pilot has operated at Innsbruck's Amras public swimming pool since April 2026. Serwas says its system recovers 98% of the heat, can supply water at 70°C and requires no upfront investment from the host; these are company claims rather than independently verified performance figures. Earlier systems based on Bitcoin-mining hardware were already operating in residential and commercial buildings, according to MCI Innsbruck.
Compute and heat have to clear the same site
The model shifts part of a data centre's cooling cost into a product the host can use. It may also reduce the need to move waste heat over long distances because the servers sit beside an existing heat load. For Serwas, however, each location must satisfy both sides of the market: suitable power and fibre connections, a dependable buyer for heat, and enough demand for the GPU capacity to keep the servers economically productive.
That makes deployment discipline as important as cooling technology. The company says a 200kW installation needs two square metres, while building owners can avoid equipment costs because Serwas finances and runs the server system. The commercial test is whether those site economics remain repeatable across buildings with different plumbing, energy prices and seasonal heat profiles.
Gateway Ventures founder Markus Kainz said the investor was drawn to the decentralised approach because computing capacity can be built where the heat is immediately useful. The financing gives Serwas room to deepen the pool pilot and open more sites; a planned second closing would add capital, but it should not be treated as completed funding until it is announced.
Sources checked:
brutkasten funding report · Serwas official website · MCI Innsbruck company feature · Austrian company register · Tech.eu Funding Explorer
Image: Johannes Aitzetmüller / MCI, via MCI Innsbruck.
