Sentilla aims small

A Bay Area company made strides in January 2009 in its mission to manage energy consumption through the power of dime-sized computers.

Redwood City-based Sentilla announced that it received $7.5 million in a Series B funding round led by Menlo Park, Calif.-based ONSET Ventures and Oakland, Calif.-based Claremont Creek Ventures. The funds will be used for development and expansion of its energy management technology, the company says.

Sentilla's key innovation is tiny computers—about the size of a postage stamp—that can be embedded into a wide range of commercial and industrial devices, CEO Bob Davis says. Groups of the computers form wireless networks, which are managed through Sentilla's Java-powered computing platform. Embedding monitors at the sites where energy is consumed provides a fine-grained energy-use analysis, which allows for meaningful adjustments in consumption, Davis says.

Sentilla says its small computers are energy-efficient and can operate for months on battery power, but it is also exploring methods of energy harvesting for field applications, in which solar, thermal or vibrational energy could be used to keep the machines running.

So far, Sentilla's technology has been employed in large industrial applications, such as metal smelters, but Davis says the company plans to enter the field of data center energy management in 2009. Data centers gobble huge amounts of power, and their consumption is expected to double between 2006 and 2011, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In its efforts to curb data center power usage, Sentilla will be joining several other companies which are marketing their own solutions, including Santa Clara, Calif.-based Power Assure and Folsom, Calif.-based SynapSense.