The chemist who wants to pull the greenhouse gas out of your air conditioner - and replace it with a solid.
Open the back of almost any air conditioner, fridge, or heat pump and you will find a gas being squeezed and released in an endless loop. That gas is the problem. It is a potent greenhouse contributor, it leaks, and by Adam Slavney's count it is responsible for about 2% of all global warming happening right now. Pascal, the company he co-founded and runs, proposes something stranger: keep the squeeze, lose the gas. Use a solid instead.
The materials are called barocaloric. Apply pressure and they change phase - not solid to liquid, not liquid to gas, but one solid arrangement to another - absorbing and releasing heat as they go. Pascal's discovery was a class of these solids that respond to pressure roughly two orders of magnitude more strongly than anything that came before. That sensitivity is the whole ballgame. It means a cooling system can run at the same pressures as today's gas machines, only smaller, more efficient, and with nothing inside that can warm the planet if it escapes. There is nothing to escape.
Slavney named the company Pascal, after the SI unit of pressure. For a man whose breakthrough is doing more with less pressure, the joke is also the thesis.
Role: Co-founder & CEO, Pascal
Base: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Trained: Ph.D. Chemistry, Stanford (perovskite solar cells); postdoc, Harvard Center for the Environment
Founded Pascal: 2023, spun out of Harvard
Why it matters: solid refrigerants with zero global warming potential for AC, heat pumps, refrigeration, and data centers.
Keep the cooling. Delete the climate cost.- THE PASCAL THESIS, IN SIX WORDS
A conventional system boils and condenses a refrigerant gas. Pascal's barocaloric material stays solid the whole time and shuffles between two crystalline states. Squeeze it, and it dumps heat. Release it, and it pulls heat back in. Same thermodynamic trick your fridge already uses - just performed by a solid that cannot leak into the sky.
Apply pressure to the solid barocaloric material.
It snaps from one crystalline state to another, releasing heat.
Drop the pressure and it flips back, absorbing heat - the cooling.
Loop it. No gas, no leak, no global warming potential.
Slavney did not set out to fix refrigeration. His doctorate at Stanford was on perovskite solar cells - the same family of materials, pointed at a different problem: capturing energy from the sun. The pivot to heat came later, and it came partly from economics.
At the Harvard University Center for the Environment, working in Jarad Mason's lab, he spent his postdoc looking as hard at the dollars of the clean-energy transition as at the chemistry. That double vision is what convinced him. Solar was crowded; cooling was enormous, dirty, and largely ignored. Heating, cooling, and refrigeration eat nearly 40% of all energy humanity generates, and the gases doing the work are quietly cooking the atmosphere. The materials he already knew how to make happened to be unusually good at the job.
So in 2023 the lab discovery became a company. Mason, the professor, became Chief Science Officer. Jinyoung Seo, who led the advanced refrigerant research, became CTO. Slavney - the technical co-founder who could have stayed at the bench - took the CEO seat. He is unapologetic about that choice.
Adam Slavney - CEO. Stanford Ph.D., Harvard postdoc.
Jinyoung Seo - CTO. Harvard Ph.D.; led the solid refrigerant research.
Jarad Mason - CSO. Harvard professor; barocaloric materials expert whose lab it spun from.
"Massachusetts has an amazing talent pool for this kind of work." Pascal set up in Cambridge to draw on Boston's unusually high concentration of mechanical engineers.
Don't assume that because you are the technical person you shouldn't be CEO. No one understands what the technology can accomplish better than you.- ADAM SLAVNEY, ON FOUNDING
Earns a Ph.D. in chemistry from Stanford, researching perovskite solar cells.
Postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment, in Jarad Mason's lab - studying solid-state thermal storage and the economics of the clean-energy transition.
Co-founds Pascal, spun out of Harvard, and becomes CEO. The mission: reimagine cooling without the climate cost.
Pascal raises an $8M seed round led by Engine Ventures, with Khosla Ventures and Blindspot Ventures participating. Named to C&EN's "10 Startups to Watch." Speaks at EmTech MIT.
Presents Pascal's low-pressure solid-state barocaloric design - costs and efficiency included - at the ATMOsphere Europe Summit, as the company scales toward larger prototypes.
"Heating, cooling, and refrigeration consume nearly 40% of all energy we generate."
"Gas refrigerants are potent greenhouse gases causing 2% of all global warming today."
"The HVAC industry is deeply conservative and has not been quick to adopt new technologies."
"Pascal is trying to build a cleaner, more efficient refrigeration system, based on solid refrigerants."
"Hardware takes a lot of money. When you have the opportunity, raise as much of it as you can."
"Pascal's solid refrigerant technology is the key to making cooling and heating sustainable."
Pascal is literally the SI unit of pressure. The pun is the product strategy: do more cooling with less pressure.
The refrigerant cools by flipping between two solid states. It cannot leak as a greenhouse gas because it is never a gas.
Slavney came to refrigeration from solar cells. Both run on the same family of perovskite materials chemistry.
His Harvard postdoc was as much about the dollars of the energy transition as the molecules - which is what pointed him at cooling.
The breakthrough materials respond to pressure about two orders of magnitude more than other solids - the reason any of this is practical.
Target uses span air conditioning, heat pumps, refrigerators, freezers - and the data centers now straining the grid.
Pascal's $8M seed was led by Engine Ventures, with Khosla Ventures and Blindspot Ventures joining. The materials trace back to Jarad Mason's Harvard lab. The mission, in Slavney's framing, is not to invent cooling - it is to keep the cooling we depend on and quietly remove the part that is warming the planet.