Cambridge Spin-Out Raises $10M to Replace Refrigerant Gas With Solid-State Cooling

For roughly a century, the world has cooled itself the same way: pump a chemical refrigerant through a compressor, expand it on the other side, and let the temperature change do the work. It''s a brilliant piece of 19th-century engineering that powers everything from your fridge to the air conditioning in a hyperscale data center. It''s also, increasingly, a problem. The refrigerant gases involved are powerful greenhouse contributors, and the heating and cooling sector now accounts for around 15% of annual global greenhouse-gas emissions — a larger footprint than aviation, with a fraction of the public attention.

A Cambridge University spin-out called Barocal thinks it can replace that century-old approach with something fundamentally different. On Sunday, May 4, the company announced a $10 million seed round to accelerate commercialisation of a solid-state cooling and heating platform that uses no refrigerant gas at all. The round was led by World Fund and Breakthrough Energy Discovery, with participation from Cambridge Enterprise Ventures and IP Group.

Barocal''s technology is built on what materials scientists call "barocaloric" effects. The short version: certain solid materials change temperature dramatically when squeezed under pressure and then released — a phenomenon that can be harnessed to move heat around without any gas, compressor, or evaporator coil. The result is a closed-loop cooling system that runs on materials science instead of chemistry. It''s solid in, solid out, with no leaks and no greenhouse-gas refrigerant to worry about.

The company is the product of more than 15 years of research by its founder, Professor Xavier Moya at Cambridge''s Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy. Moya has been one of the leading voices in caloric materials globally, and Barocal — founded in 2019 — represents the first serious attempt to push his lab work into commercial deployment.

The market is enormous. The global heating, ventilation, and air conditioning sector is currently valued at roughly $450 billion and is projected to reach $577 billion by 2033. Inside that market, no segment is growing faster than data center cooling. Every additional gigawatt of AI compute requires a corresponding gigawatt of heat to be removed from servers, and current cooling systems are already a meaningful share of an average data center''s energy bill. Cooling alone accounted for more than 4 gigatonnes of CO₂-equivalent emissions in 2022, and demand is expected to triple by 2050 as the developing world air-conditions and the AI buildout continues.

Barocal''s pitch is that it can hit that market at cost parity with vapour-compression systems while delivering both efficiency gains and the elimination of refrigerant gas leaks. The company plans to use the new funding to expand its engineering team, scale up its prototypes, and prepare for initial commercial deployments — with data center cooling and commercial refrigeration as its first target applications.

What makes the moment unusual is the alignment of several previously separate trends. Hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have all set aggressive net-zero targets and are increasingly willing to pay a premium for cleaner cooling solutions. Regulators in Europe, the UK, and parts of the US are tightening rules on hydrofluorocarbons and other high-warming refrigerants. And the AI boom has, somewhat unexpectedly, made data center thermal management one of the most strategically important categories in the entire energy transition.

For Barocal, the timing means a startup that might otherwise have spent years searching for early customers now has them lining up. Solid-state cooling has been a "lab of the future" technology for decades; the race now is to be the first to put it inside an actual server rack at scale.

If the company''s technology delivers what it promises, the implications go beyond climate accounting. A cooling system without leaks, without compressors, and without the noise and maintenance overhead of vapour-compression hardware would be quieter, smaller, and more reliable. It would also, finally, retire one of the largest invisible chunks of the world''s carbon footprint. Not bad for a piece of materials science that started life in a Cambridge lab.