Barocal raises $10M to replace century-old cooling tech with solid-state materials
What's the deal? Barocal, a Cambridge University spin-out, has raised $10M (€8.6M) in seed funding to commercialise its solid-state cooling and heating technology. The round was led by World Fund, with participation from Breakthrough Energy Discovery, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, and IP GroupDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →.
Founded in 2019 by Prof. Xavier Moya, a leading caloric materials researcher, Barocal has developed a patented platform that uses pressure-driven phase transitions in barocaloric materials to generate large temperature changes — no refrigerant gases required. The company says it can match traditional vapour-compression systems on cost while cutting emissions.
Why now? Global demand for cooling is surging, driven in part by the explosive growth of data centres. The global HVAC market is worth roughly $450B and is expected to reach $577B by 2033. Cooling alone accounted for more than 4 gigatonnes of CO₂ equivalent in 2022, and demand is expected to triple by 2050.
The heating and cooling sector is responsible for around 15% of annual global greenhouse gas emissions — more than aviation, yet receiving far less attention. Traditional systems rely on climate-damaging refrigerant gases that regulators are increasingly moving to phase out.
Barocal has already gained recognition, winning the $1M 2025 TERA-Award. The fresh capital will fund senior technical and commercial hires to accelerate system development ahead of commercial deployment.
What could go wrong? Caloric cooling has long struggled to move from the lab to the market. Many caloric materials degrade or fatigue over time, and scaling a novel materials platform to compete with entrenched vapour-compression systems — a technology refined over more than a century — is a formidable engineering and manufacturing challenge.
Cost parity claims remain unproven at scale. Data centre operators and commercial refrigeration buyers will need convincing that a startup's technology can match the reliability and performance of incumbent systems.
The signal: World Fund's lead on this round underscores a growing climate-VC thesis: that the biggest decarbonisation gains lie not in well-funded sectors like EVs or solar, but in unglamorous industrial categories such as heating and cooling. The involvement of IP Group — a listed investor that specialises in commercialising university science — signals confidence that Barocal's Cambridge IP can survive the leap from lab to market, a journey that has historically defeated most caloric cooling ventures.
Read more: globenewswire.com
