Startup Barocal Raises $10M for Revolutionary Solid-State Cooling Technology Without Refrigerants
A University of Cambridge spin-off has developed a system that uses the barocaloric effect instead of harmful gases. The technology aims to reduce the 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions generated by heating and cooling systems.
Cooling without a compressor or refrigerant: How startup Barocal raised $10M for a technology that could rewrite the rules of the HVAC industry
Introduction
The heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) market is a massive industry worth around $450 billion, yet for all its scale, it operates on technological principles that are a century old. Vapor compression systems using gaseous refrigerants are reliable and cheap, but their side effect—leaks of refrigerants with a global warming potential thousands of times greater than CO₂—has turned the HVAC sector into a source of roughly 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions, exceeding the contribution of the entire aviation industry. In May 2026, Cambridge-based startup Barocal announced it had raised $10 million in seed funding to bring to market a solid-state alternative that requires no gases and promises to be more efficient than traditional systems. This event raises a fundamental question: Is the world finally ready to say goodbye to the compressor?
Event Details and Timeline
Barocal Ltd. is a University of Cambridge spin-off founded in 2019 by materials science professor Xavier Moya. The company is based in Cambridge and specializes in so-called barocaloric materials—solids that heat up when compressed and cool down when pressure is released. This property, known as the barocaloric effect, is the foundation of its patented platform.
The $10 million seed round (approximately €8.6 million or £7.4 million) was officially confirmed in early May 2026. Investors include World Fund, Breakthrough Energy Discovery (a program founded by Bill Gates), Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, and IP Group. The composition of participants is telling: Breakthrough Energy Discovery first supported the project at the research fellowship stage, and the current investment reflects growing confidence in the commercial prospects of the development.
Ashley Grosh, head of Breakthrough Energy Discovery, noted that "decarbonizing heating and cooling is critical," given that buildings account for roughly 7% of global emissions. IP Group, for its part, invested £2 million, emphasizing that the technology promises "tremendous efficiency gains." The raised funds will be used to expand the engineering team and accelerate preparations for commercial launch.
The technical essence of the development is elegant and unusual. Barocal's materials belong to a class of organic compounds already widely used in industry—from plastics to paints. In their normal state, the molecules inside rotate freely. When compressed, the rotation stops, and since heat at the micro level is the movement of atoms and molecules, "freezing" the rotation causes the material to release heat. Releasing pressure triggers the reverse process—heat absorption. In a refrigerator, for example, the material is alternately compressed and relaxed, pumping heat from inside to outside—with ordinary water, not gas, acting as the heat transfer fluid.
Crucially, the technology has already achieved efficiency comparable to existing compressors at the prototype level. And in 2025, the project received the TERA-Award worth $1 million, an additional signal of technological maturity.
Impact and Significance (for the World / Industry / Society)
The historical context gives the event an almost dramatic tone. Vapor compression technology has not fundamentally changed in over a hundred years. Dozens of alternative approaches have tried to challenge it—from thermoelectric elements to magnetocaloric systems—but all have run into a combination of high cost, low efficiency, and material degradation. Barocal claims to have found a way to overcome all three barriers simultaneously, and if this is confirmed at industrial scale, enormous opportunities open up for the world.
The environmental aspect is the most obvious and the most significant. Today's hydrofluorocarbon-based refrigerants have a global warming potential 1,000 times or more greater than CO₂. Any leak during installation, operation, or disposal of equipment is inevitable. Solid-state materials, by definition, do not leak. No gas means no problem. Eliminating refrigerants from the chain entirely removes the source of emissions, rather than attempting to capture or offset them afterward.
Economic significance is equally important. The target market is the global HVAC industry, worth $450 billion and projected to grow to $577 billion by 2033. Demand for cooling is expected to triple by 2050. Large commercial systems—data centers, industrial refrigeration, office building air conditioning—will be Barocal's first targets, since efficiency gains there translate more quickly into tangible savings for customers.
Data center cooling deserves special attention. With the spread of AI computing, energy consumption by server farms is growing rapidly, and an increasing share goes to heat removal. A technology that can cut cooling energy costs by two to three times with comparable equipment costs could reshape the economics of the entire cloud industry.
For society, the stakes are defined by the founder's own words: "The world can only achieve the 1.5°C target if it roughly halves emissions—solving the emissions from heating and cooling would allow us to reach that goal." Given that cooling accounted for over 4 gigatons of CO₂ equivalent in 2022, and demand is set to triple by 2050, the scale of the problem is hard to overstate.
Reactions from Key Players
Investors offered markedly optimistic but substantive comments. Mark Windeknecht of World Fund articulated the achievement: "Barocal has done what scientists have been working on for decades—a materials breakthrough that delivers a solid-state platform for cooling and heating that truly competes with vapor systems." The phrase "decades of attempts" is no exaggeration: numerous laboratories have worked on caloric materials, and Moya's team is the first to demonstrate characteristics that seriously warrant talk of commercialization.
Ashley Grosh of Breakthrough Energy Discovery noted that the department "first supported the project through a fellowship program, where Professor Moya's years of research stood out for technical depth and commercial potential," and that the new funding reflects "growing confidence in the team's ability to scale a solid-state alternative to vapor compression."
Dr. Lee Thornton of IP Group emphasized that "the £2 million investment will allow the company to reach the next milestones on the path to commercial reality," and described Barocal as "a classic transformational company" that IP Group invests in.
Xavier Moya himself strikes a balance between scientific caution and entrepreneurial enthusiasm: "Heating and cooling have always been the 'elephant in the room' in emissions conversations, and our material set can change the story."
Reactions from major HVAC equipment manufacturers—Carrier, Trane, Daikin, Mitsubishi Electric—are currently absent from the public domain, which is understandable: the conservative industry traditionally responds slowly to laboratory breakthroughs, preferring to wait for industrial prototypes and independent verification. However, the very fact that Breakthrough Energy—an organization closely tied to Bill Gates and deeply knowledgeable about energy markets—has increased its support from a research grant to a full investment round sends an unmistakable signal to the industry.
Forecast and Conclusions
Raising $10 million is not a record sum by venture capital standards, but for a deep climate startup at the seed stage, it is a significant indicator, especially given the caliber of investors. The money will be directed not at fundamental research but at engineering scale-up, signaling the project's transition from the scientific phase to the engineering phase.
In the short term (one to two years), we can expect pilot installations in data centers and commercial refrigeration systems. The three-to-five-year horizon involves entering the commercial cooling market with products competitive in total cost of ownership. Further expansion—into residential air conditioners and heat pumps, a mass market with fierce price competition—will only be possible after gaining manufacturing experience and reducing costs.
The main question is not whether the technology works, but whether it can achieve the claimed "price parity" with vapor compression systems. A century-old industry has optimized production to the penny, and to displace it, being greener and more efficient is not enough—it must be comparable in price. Solving this challenge will determine whether Barocal enters history books alongside the inventors of vapor compression or remains yet another promising but unrealized laboratory technology.
The Barocal story also illustrates an important shift in climate investments: mature technological solutions in energy transition and electric vehicles are already well-funded, and investor attention is now moving to less visible but critically important sectors—such as heating and cooling, which account for 15% of global emissions and have long remained the "elephant in the room," overshadowed by more media-friendly issues.
— Editorial Team
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