At 3:14 a.m. in a Domino's somewhere in Ohio, a refrigerator compressor decides it has had enough. It does not announce this. It simply begins drawing 18% more power than it did yesterday, while creeping two degrees warmer inside. The mozzarella does not know. The night manager does not know. Nobody knows - except, in this case, a small dashboard glowing on a laptop in San Francisco, where an alert has already pinged, a work order has already drafted itself, and the fridge has been politely rescheduled for a service visit before breakfast.
This is the unglamorous, unphotogenic, deeply consequential business of GlacierGrid. It is also, depending on who you ask, one of the more interesting climate companies in the country.
"Cooling is responsible for roughly 10% of global CO2 emissions. Almost no one is paying attention." That, in a sentence, is the GlacierGrid thesis.
GlacierGrid - which until February 2024 went by Therma - is an AI-powered platform for the part of commercial buildings nobody wants to think about: the HVAC, the walk-ins, the reach-ins, the ice machines, the rooftop units humming above every McDonald's, Marriott and 7-Eleven you have ever walked into. Founded in 2020 by Manik Suri and Aaron Cohen, the company sits in a category most people would call "boring," and which the rest of us increasingly call "the climate fight."