heat-pumps
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Mark Kasdorf Left the App Economy to Build a Heat-Pump Workforce
After bootstrapping a mobile studio to $25 million and selling it to Accenture, the serial founder chose a harder interface: houses, crews and the stubborn shortage of skilled labor.
Shwan Lamei
Shwan Lamei is co-founder and CEO of Emulate Energy, a Lund- and Boston-based software company that turns everyday household devices - heat pumps, EV chargers, home batteries, solar inverters - into a coordinated 'virtual battery' that utilities can dispatch on flexibility and balancing markets. Trained as an industrial engineer at Lund University, he spent 15 years in industrial B2B sales and corporate development at SWEP and Dover before starting Emulate in 2020 with a childhood friend whose MIT postdoctoral research became the technical seed of the company. In April 2025 Emulate closed a EUR 5M Series A led by Helen Ventures to scale its DER orchestration platform across Scandinavia, the DACH region and the United States.
Adam Slavney
Adam Slavney is the co-founder and CEO of Pascal, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup commercializing solid-state refrigerants to replace the planet-warming gases inside air conditioners, heat pumps, refrigerators and data centers. A Stanford-trained chemist who studied perovskite solar cells before a Harvard postdoc in clean-energy economics, Slavney spun Pascal out of Harvard in 2023 around a class of barocaloric materials that respond to pressure two orders of magnitude more strongly than other solids. The company raised an $8M seed round in 2024 led by Engine Ventures, with Khosla Ventures participating, and later added a Series A to scale prototypes. Slavney's pitch is blunt: heating and cooling burn nearly 40% of the world's energy and the refrigerants doing it cause about 2% of global warming, and he wants to keep the cooling while deleting the climate cost.
Phil Krinner
Phil Krinner is the co-founder and CEO of Arch, a San Francisco company building AI revenue software for home services contractors, starting with HVAC and heat pumps. A Stanford GSB graduate and former McKinsey strategy consultant who once built large-scale solar plants and installed panels himself, Krinner started Arch after asking 15 contractors to quote a heat pump for his apartment and finding that not one could tell him whether it would save money. Arch uses public home data and AI to help contractors find the right homes, size systems in minutes, and run hyper-personalized campaigns. The company raised a $6.2M seed round in 2024 led by Coatue with Floodgate, Gigascale, ReGen and MCJ.