When KKR bought CoolIT Systems in 2023, the staff were handed a share of the outcome.
A Calgary law firm that acted on the deal noted that employees became owners through a broad-based ownership programme. In a sale of a technology company, that is unusual enough to mention. It also hints at something about the place: a company that had spent more than twenty years in a quiet corner of computing, where people matter more than slogans.
AI chips draw far more power than the servers before them, and the heat they throw off became a design problem for every operator.
CoolIT started in Calgary in 2001. Its business was moving heat away from processors, first with liquid loops for desktop computers and then for the data centres that run the internet. What the record does show is persistence. This was not a product that seemed urgent when it began. Air cooling was cheap and familiar, and most data-centre operators saw no reason to put liquid near expensive electronics.
Then the load changed. AI chips draw far more power than the servers before them, and the heat they throw off became a design problem for every operator. Direct-to-chip liquid cooling, once a specialty, started to look like infrastructure.
KKR and Mubadala completed the purchase in July 2023. One outlet reported a price of US$365m, though terms were never officially published. Three years later the picture had shifted. Ecolab agreed to buy CoolIT for about US$4.75bn, with closing expected in the third quarter of 2026. A law firm involved called it one of the largest technology deals for a Calgary company.
The gap between those two figures says something blunt about timing. The technology barely changed. The world around it did.
For employees who held shares after 2023, the story ends with a payoff their founders could scarcely have scheduled. For anyone starting a company today, the takeaway is an uncomfortable one. Being early can look the same as being wrong for a very long time. The founders who survive are the ones who can afford to wait, and the ones who remember to share the reward with the people who waited with them.