Pascal raises $8.5M to update 170-year-old heat pump tech
What's the deal? Pascal has raised $8.5 million in a seed extension co-led by Sazze PartnersDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and LB InvestmentDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, with participation from KDB Silicon Valley. The Boston startup is developing refrigerators and heat pumps that use carbon dioxide and a porous solid material instead of conventional refrigerants alone.
Why now? The round came together after Pascal signed a pilot contract with a multinational beverage company, co-founder and chief executive officer Adam Slavney told TechCrunch. He said the deal landed sooner than expected.
What's the endgame? Pascal says its material could make refrigerators and heat pumps around 20% more efficient. Its system compresses carbon dioxide into a cartridge filled with a sponge-like porous material; as gas moves through the pores, it transfers energy to the material, and a heat exchanger moves that heat in or out of the appliance.
The pitch is cost. "We're using conventional systems to do it," Slavney said. "That mean we believe we can make it cheap, and that means we can make it widespread."
What could go wrong? The technology remains at prototype stage. Pascal plans to deliver its first prototype early next year and aims to produce a batch of more polished refrigerators in 2028 — leaving open whether the claimed gains survive real-world trials and manufacturing scale-up.
Pascal grew out of research by Slavney and co-founder and chief technology officer Jinyoung Seo at Harvard University, where unexpected lab results pointed to a new approach to solid-state refrigeration. Slavney said the material had been cycled up to 300,000 times, roughly a year of operation.
The signal: The raise sits in the top 4% of all US real estate seed rounds by size, but its significance is the early commercial signal rather than scale. It follows Quilt's $20 million round in December 2025 to expand heat-pump sales — a sign investors see momentum in cleaner cooling, where older gases like Freon harmed the ozone layer and newer ones remain potent greenhouse gases.
Read more: mezha.net
Image credit: Pascal
