Pascal Raises $8.5 Million for Solid-State Cooling Bet

Pascal has raised $8.5 million in a follow-on to its seed round, co-led by Sazze Partners and LB Investment with participation from KDB Silicon Valley, the company exclusively told TechCrunch.

The startup builds a new class of refrigerants for refrigerators, air conditioners and heat pumps. CEO Adam Slavney said appliances using Pascal's material should be roughly 20% more efficient than existing models. A multinational beverage company has already signed a contract for a pilot of the technology.

"This whole funding round came together originally because we got a customer contract earlier than we were expecting to," Slavney told TechCrunch.

Slavney co-founded Pascal with Jinyoung Seo, who serves as CTO. Both were researchers at Harvard University when a routine experiment produced puzzling results.

How did the discovery happen?

The team was testing materials for more efficient cooling appliances. The measurements should have matched. They didn't.

"Why are these things different? What did we change?" Slavney said. "We had an inkling of it within three-ish months, but we didn't have definitive proof for a year or two."

The researchers had been running high-pressure measurements. The instrument required gas, so they used one gas, then swapped to another. The results diverged, and the anomaly pointed them toward a new path to solid-state refrigeration.

That accidental finding now underpins the entire company.

Why does refrigerant chemistry matter?

Scientists have hunted for better refrigerants almost as long as refrigerators have existed. The modern record is poor. Older gaseous refrigerants like Freon ate a hole in the ozone layer. Newer ones like R-134a spare the ozone but remain extremely potent greenhouse gases.

"We've been playing whack-a-mole with refrigerants for 35 years, 40 years," Slavney said. "It's just a never-ending treadmill."

Solid-state refrigerants offer a way off that treadmill. Because they are solid, they cannot escape into the atmosphere. That eliminates the climate and ozone problems that haunt modern gases. Solid-state materials also work like traditional refrigerants in one key respect: they give off heat when squeezed and absorb it when the pressure releases.

What makes Pascal's approach different?

Most solid-state approaches squeeze a solid block of material directly. Pascal's system instead compresses a gas — carbon dioxide — into a cartridge containing a sponge-like proprietary material.

The mechanism works at the molecular level. As carbon dioxide works into the porous material, gas molecules inside the pores bounce off the walls. Those collisions transfer energy to the material and warm it. A heat exchanger then exhausts some of that heat. Run the process in reverse, and the material absorbs energy from the heat exchanger and transfers it back to the carbon dioxide molecules.

A Pascal refrigerator runs two cartridges at any given time. One absorbs heat from the inside of the refrigerator and transfers it to the carbon dioxide. The other takes heat from the carbon dioxide and dumps it into the outside air. When the cartridges get too hot and too cold, the flow reverses.

The design moves heat more effectively than rival solid-state refrigerants. That matters for engineering and cost: Pascal's system does not need the high pressures that other solid-state approaches might demand.

"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."

How durable is the material?

Longevity is the make-or-break question for any refrigerant. Pascal has stress-tested its material hard.

"The material is very robust," Slavney said. "We've cycled it up to 300,000 times. It's the equivalent of a year or so in operation."

That durability data now feeds the commercial timeline. Pascal is on track to deliver its first prototype early next year. It hopes to follow with a batch of more polished refrigerators in 2028.

The beverage company pilot will give the first real-world test of the technology, and its results will likely determine whether Pascal's 20% efficiency claim survives contact with paying customers.