Every time a grocery store refrigeration system leaks coolant - quietly, invisibly, behind the frozen peas - it releases a gas that is up to 4,000 times more potent than CO2. It happens in roughly a quarter of all U.S. supermarkets every single year. Amrit Robbins noticed this problem a decade before it was fashionable to care about it, and built two companies trying to fix it.
The Discovery That Changed Everything
Robbins graduated from Stanford with a degree in Atmosphere and Energy Engineering. Not software. Not finance. The actual physics of cooling and heating the planet. He went straight to work at Clarke Energy Group, where he helped co-lead a $100 million energy efficiency retrofit project for a major supermarket chain. That engagement handed him a datapoint that rewired his thinking: grocery stores spend 55 to 65 percent of their entire energy budget on refrigeration. Not lighting. Not HVAC for the people inside. Refrigeration, for the food.
The back room of a grocery store, it turned out, was one of the highest-stakes climate environments in the country - and nobody was paying attention. Amrit Robbins decided that was the opportunity.
"In low-margin businesses like grocery and cold storage, refrigeration is basically the whole ballgame for energy, maintenance, uptime, and sustainability - and there's a lot of opportunity for improvement."
Hardware First, Software Second
In 2013, Robbins co-founded Axiom Exergy with Anthony Diamond. The idea was bold and deeply physical: a thermal battery system that could retrofit existing grocery store refrigeration units, shifting energy use away from peak grid hours and making supermarkets more grid-flexible. They sold pilots to Amazon's Whole Foods and to Walmart. They raised a $7.6M Series A. They made the Global Cleantech 100 in 2020. And in 2017, Forbes named both Robbins and Diamond to the 30 Under 30 list in Energy.
Hardware is hard. The scale challenges that come with physical deployment - logistics, installation crews, unit economics, COVID-19 disruption - eventually created an insurmountable wall. Rather than fold, Robbins stepped back and asked a sharper question: what if the same problems could be solved through software, without installing anything new at all?
Axiom Cloud: The Software Pivot
In 2020, he co-founded Axiom Cloud with Nikhil Saralkar. The company's approach is surgically different from what came before: no new hardware, no new sensors, no rip-and-replace. Axiom Cloud's AI integrates directly into the existing refrigeration control systems already running in grocery stores and cold storage facilities. It reads the data those systems already generate, monitors more than 400,000 data streams, and uses machine learning to detect anomalies - refrigerant leaks, equipment failures, efficiency losses - often weeks before a human technician would notice anything wrong.
Customers include Grocery Outlet, Sprouts, HelloFresh, and Whole Foods Market. Payback period is under one year. Axiom Cloud's customers resolved 70 percent of predictive anomalies within 45 days of deployment. Installation happens fully remotely. The EPA has recognized Axiom Cloud as one of only ten compliant Automatic Leak Detection providers under the AIM Act - a federal mandate that will require approximately 20,000 U.S. facilities to install automatic refrigerant monitoring systems.
Robbins's go-to-market strategy has the precision of someone who has been burned before: "We start with three pilots, three months, five stores for free." He is not selling a category. He is removing the reason to say no.
The Climate Case Is Hiding in Plain Sight
Project Drawdown - the authoritative ranking of climate solutions by potential impact - places refrigerant management at number four on its global list. Above electric vehicles. Above offshore wind. Robbins has been working on this since most people couldn't spell "refrigerant." The average U.S. supermarket leaks 25 percent of its refrigerant every year. Multiply that by tens of thousands of stores, and the emissions figure becomes staggering.
The AIM Act, signed into law in 2020 and now moving into enforcement, has created a regulatory tailwind that Axiom Cloud is positioned to ride. Facilities with 1,500 pounds or more of refrigerant installed after January 2017 must have automated leak detection in place by January 2027. Axiom Cloud is already there.
On Technicians, AI, and the People Doing the Work
The HVAC&R sector faces a shortage of roughly 110,000 technicians in the U.S., with 25,000 leaving the workforce every year. Robbins is blunt about what AI can and cannot fix here. He refuses to sell the fantasy that software eliminates the need for skilled human labor. His argument is the opposite: Axiom Cloud's diagnostic AI can compress a five-year apprenticeship into months of productive work, turning a new technician into someone with the diagnostic intuition of a veteran - because the system has already learned from real-world operational data at scale.
"I definitely do not predict a future where AI replaces refrigeration technicians," he has said. "It's just not going to happen anytime soon, or in the foreseeable future." He also advocates rebranding the role entirely - from "person who fixes leaks in grocery store back rooms" to "sustainability technician working on next-generation cooling systems." The climate angle, he argues, resonates with younger workers in a way that the old framing never did.
The Trumpet Player in the Machine Room
There is another version of Amrit Robbins's life in which he moved to New York after Stanford to study music. He plays trumpet across jazz, reggae, funk, salsa, and R&B. His admired musician is Ingrid Jensen - a jazz trumpet player known for moving fluidly between genres, for technical precision inside improvisational freedom. It is not a difficult metaphor. Robbins built a hardware company and pivoted cleanly to software. He approaches a heavily regulation-driven industry with the sensibility of an entrepreneur who builds for organic adoption, not policy mandates.
"Rather than using policy as a tool to force people to do things they don't want to do," he has said, "I'm more interested in using technology and entrepreneurship to develop new solutions that will be organically and scalably adopted by folks who are just interested in making better decisions." That was Axiom Exergy's thesis. It's Axiom Cloud's thesis. It probably started with watching An Inconvenient Truth as a kid and deciding that the problem was not awareness - it was tools.
Where It Goes From Here
Axiom Cloud has raised $26 million across its rounds, including a $7.4M Series A in January 2023 led by Blue Bear Capital, and a $5M round in February 2024 led by Toshiba Tec and WindSail Capital Group. The team has grown to around 21 people. Annual revenue is tracking toward $4 million. The AIM Act compliance window is tightening. European retailers, as Robbins has noted after attending EuroCIS 2025, think about refrigeration systems differently than their U.S. counterparts - which means there is a global expansion argument to be made.
The grocery store back room is not glamorous. It smells like compressor oil and cardboard. But it is where Amrit Robbins has decided to fight climate change - not with protests or policy papers, but with software that makes the right decision the obvious one. That's the bet. So far, the odds look good.