The Fire Awards: Flexnode

Editor's note: Each year, DC Inno and the Washington Business Journal publish the Fire Awards spotlighting the founders, funders and fast-growing companies helping to power Greater Washington’s innovation economy. Click here to read our other profiles.

The need for data centers, especially in an era where the growing use of artificial intelligence-based technologies is sucking up powerful computing resources, isn’t likely to slow anytime soon, nor is the timeline for building these sprawling facilities expected to speed up.

Bethesda startup Flexnode is working to address both issues.

The 5-year-old company builds modular data centers for companies who need them in a matter of hours, not years, at a fraction of the cost of building a traditional data center. Its first prefabricated data center opened last year in Long Island City, New York, and the company has ambitions to deploy many more in the U.S. and, eventually, overseas, according to CEO Andrew Lindsey.

By using modular design mechanics, Flexnode can build a data center overnight under certain conditions and can easily add capacity as a user’s needs grow, without significant disruption. A standard 36-rack data center clocks in at just over 1,700 square feet, Lindsey said.

To fuel its growth, Flexnode recently raised $8.85 million in a Series A funding round led by San Francisco’s Zacua Ventures. The funding brings Flexnode’s total capital infusion to nearly $14 million, following a $3.5 million grant it won from a U.S. Department of Energy program aimed at developing reliable cooling technologies for data centers.

The company is also using the new capital to grow its workforce, currently at 16 employees.

Flexnode is targeting builders, real estate firms, systems integrators and cloud service providers — pretty much companies in any industry that have a need for data centers.

While it’s primarily targeting domestic customers, Lindsey said he expects to take the business globally — though it will take raising additional capital to get there.

“We believe that the solutions that we’ve built out are very much applicable in the United States, but carry over globally,” he said.

Flexnode