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Menlo Microsystems brought in $44 million in Series B funding to make electronic switches smarter.
“There are a lot of places with electronic switches and millions of buildings,” said Menlo Microsystems CEO Russ Garcia. “If you could turn things on and off a hundred or thousand times faster or have automatic sensing, energy becomes a savings. It will have a huge impact.”
The company’s reinvention of the switch is in the form of the Ideal Switch, which eliminates the shortcomings of the electromagnetic relays and solid-state switches being used today. It also provides users a 99 percent or more reduction in key system-level metrics including performance, size, weight, power consumption and cost.
“The electronic switch hasn’t changed much–in fact, the circuit breaker was invented 140 years ago–and needs to be faster and manage energy better,” Garcia said. “This research was born out of the General Electric research lab and perfected over 12 years. In 2016, we moved it into a high-volume manufacturing capability and are scaling it now.”
