hvac
(30)The $4.5 Billion HVAC Empire Two Guys Named Johnson and Stone Never Saw Coming
It started as one refrigeration shop in Portland with a name stitched from its two founders. Seventy years later it moves heat pumps, compressors and thermostats through 450-plus branches - and the contractors who buy from it once owned the whole thing.
The Company Behind the Gauge on the Wall
Dwyer Instruments has been making the little pressure gauges bolted to industrial walls since 1931. In 2022 it swallowed OMEGA Engineering - a company twice its public profile - and became a measurement conglomerate hiding in plain sight.
The 140-Year-Old Thermostat Company Cooling the AI Boom
Johnson Controls began with a classroom that was too hot. Today, its chillers, controls and service crews sit at the intersection of two expensive problems: buildings use too much energy, and AI infrastructure produces too much heat.
HomeWorks Energy, Inc.
HomeWorks Energy built a sizable climate business around an unglamorous truth: before a house can go electric, somebody has to find the drafts, explain the rebates and do the work.
Sila Services
Sila Services is assembling a regional home-repair network without sanding the names off the trucks. Its bet is that the best way to scale HVAC, plumbing and electrical work is to keep local trust out front - and put recruiting, technology and capital behind it.
Hiller Plumbing, Heating, Cooling & Electrical
Hiller started with $500, one truck and a promise to leave the work area clean. Thirty-six years later, its real product is bigger than plumbing or HVAC: a repeatable system for making an anxious homeowner feel in control.
Trane Technologies
The company behind Trane and Thermo King is turning a century of cooling know-how into an energy-management business for buildings, refrigerated fleets and AI data centers. Its wager is simple: the cheapest new energy is often the energy a machine stops wasting.
Lennox
A 130-year-old furnace maker has become a $5.2 billion climate-control platform. Its real advantage is not the metal box outside the house - it is the dealer network, parts shelf and service loop wrapped around it.
Axross
Axross is a Singapore-based, Y Combinator W22 climate-tech company that builds AI-driven HVAC control systems for industrial facilities. By layering machine-learning optimization, IoT sensing, and building-management-system integration on top of existing cooling infrastructure, Axross helps manufacturers in energy-intensive sectors like pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and precision manufacturing cut HVAC energy use by up to 30%, lower Scope 2 emissions, and hold production environments precisely stable - without ripping out the equipment they already own.
Cheers
Cheers is a Y Combinator (S24) startup building a full-stack Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) platform for local service businesses. It helps HVAC, plumbing, roofing, solar and smart-home companies get recommended by AI assistants like ChatGPT and by Google, by auditing their AI visibility, fixing their web presence, and turning frontline employees into a review engine using NFC tap tools with per-employee attribution.
NOSO LABS
NOSO LABS builds AI agents for field-service technicians in home-services trades - starting with HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and pest control. Its agents automatically follow up on unsold estimates over text, sync notes to the CRM, and route complex jobs to a back-office dashboard, aiming to recover revenue that would otherwise slip through the cracks without adding headcount. Founded in 2025 by Winston Chi and Alex Xi, the San Francisco company is part of Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch.
SensorFlow
SensorFlow is a Singapore-based proptech company that uses wireless IoT sensors and AI to help hotels monitor, analyze and automate their energy use - primarily air-conditioning. Its retrofit-ready hardware installs in minutes with no upfront cost and typically cuts HVAC energy consumption by around 30%, letting properties lower operating costs and carbon emissions while keeping guest rooms comfortable. Founded in 2016 and backed by investors including Openspace Ventures and Gaw Capital, the company serves hospitality brands across Asia-Pacific and beyond.
Blue Box Air
Blue Box Air is a Dallas-based cleantech company that restores and maintains commercial HVAC heat-transfer coils using a patented, enzyme-infused bio-treatment process. By cleaning coils from the inside out - with no downtime and no equipment removal - Blue Box improves airflow and heat transfer, cutting building energy consumption and carbon emissions while improving indoor air quality. Its Bio-Automation system keeps coils continuously clean, and the company markets a 'self-cleaning deep coil' that promises far greater heat-transfer surface area than conventional systems.
Meriton
Meriton is an Irving, Texas-based national alliance of independent commercial HVAC manufacturer representatives. Founded in 2019 and led by Chairman & CEO Jerry Braun, it unites market-leading rep firms under a shared-services model - giving local businesses access to national scale, engineering depth, and corporate support in finance, HR, IT, safety, training, and marketing while letting them keep their names and local autonomy. Through more than two dozen acquisitions, Meriton now spans 19 operating brands, 44 locations, roughly 26 states, and 2,100+ employees serving manufacturers, contractors, engineers, and building owners across commercial, industrial, and institutional markets.
Stellar
Stellar is a Dallas-based, technology-driven marketplace that connects property managers and homeowners with vetted local tradespeople to get home maintenance and repairs done right. Founded in 2016 as IFM Restoration and rebranded to Stellar in 2022, the company pairs software, AI and a network of thousands of contractors to resolve maintenance at scale, initially for the single-family rental industry and increasingly for homeowners across the U.S. Sun Belt. It serves major single-family rental operators and books repair appointments for homeowners across 30-plus markets.
Vigilante Plumbing, Heating and Air Conditioning
Vigilante Plumbing, Heating and Air Conditioning is a family-owned Brooklyn contractor that has served New York City since 1927. Now in its third and fourth generation under the Vigilante family, the company handles residential and commercial plumbing, heating, air conditioning, drain and sewer work, and fire-protection systems across the five boroughs, built on flat-rate pricing, licensed master plumbers, and background-checked technicians.
Quilt
Quilt is a Redwood City climate-tech company building a software-defined ductless heat pump for room-by-room home heating and cooling. Founded in 2022 by former Google and Nest people, its system pairs an outdoor compressor with slim indoor heads that carry millimeter-wave occupancy sensors, a Quilt Dial thermostat, and an app that ships over-the-air updates so the hardware gets smarter after install. Quilt sells direct-to-consumer through certified installers and has raised $62M across seed, Series A, and Series B rounds to move households off fossil-fuel heating.
Pascal
Pascal is a Cambridge, Massachusetts climate-tech company commercializing solid refrigerants to replace the greenhouse-gas coolants that make air conditioners, heat pumps, and refrigerators bad for the climate. Spun out of Harvard in 2023, Pascal builds cooling systems around barocaloric materials - wax-like layered solids that absorb and release heat when squeezed and released - working at pressures low enough to run on today's mass-market HVAC hardware. The company raised an $8M seed round in 2024 and aims to eliminate refrigerant emissions while cutting cost and boosting efficiency.
Prefix
Prefix is a New York-based facility management platform for multi-site restaurant and retail operators. It acts as the connective layer between brands and local service technicians - coordinating on-demand and preventive repairs across HVAC, refrigeration, plumbing and electrical, and managing the full job lifecycle from request to invoice. With AI-powered vendor management and 24/7 support, Prefix says it delivers roughly 3x efficiency gains and 15%+ cost savings for the nearly 2,000 locations it serves.
Axiom Cloud
Axiom Cloud builds AI software that makes commercial refrigeration systems cheaper to run, easier to maintain, and dramatically less polluting. Its cloud platform plugs into existing refrigeration controllers at grocery stores and cold-storage facilities to spot refrigerant leaks early, shift energy use off-peak, and automate work orders - cutting both costs and the climate impact of supermarket cooling.
GlacierGrid
GlacierGrid (formerly Therma) is a San Francisco climate-tech company whose AI-powered Cooling Intelligence Platform combines IoT sensors, machine learning, and equipment controls to cut energy use, prevent food waste, and reduce carbon emissions across HVAC and refrigeration systems. Its customers include McDonald's, 7-Eleven, Marriott, Domino's, Dutch Bros, Taco Bell, Wendy's, Dunkin', Vail Resorts, and Cornell University.
Stratus
Stratus is a cloud-based BIM-to-fabrication platform built for MEP (mechanical, electrical, plumbing) contractors. It connects the digital model - Revit, AutoCAD and Autodesk Fabrication - to the prefab shop and the field, handling spooling, smart labeling, bend sheets, weld maps, material tracking and real-time productivity metrics so trade contractors can move from design to installed pipe, duct and conduit with less waste and fewer manual handoffs. Developed by GTP Software, Inc. (formerly GTP Services), Stratus serves large mechanical and sheet-metal contractors across North America and raised a $32M Series B in 2025.
Bedrock Energy
Bedrock Energy is an Austin-based geothermal startup making heating and cooling for commercial buildings cheaper and cleaner. By reengineering oil-and-gas drilling technology with real-time subsurface sensing and simulation software, Bedrock drills geothermal boreholes up to 5x faster, then designs and delivers ground-source heat pump systems that can cut a building's HVAC energy costs in half while slashing related air pollution.
Dandelion Energy
Dandelion Energy is an Alphabet (Google X) spinout that designs, installs, and finances residential and multifamily geothermal heating and cooling systems. By drilling ground loops that tap the earth's stable temperature and pairing them with a proprietary heat pump, Dandelion replaces fossil-fuel furnaces and air conditioners with a single all-electric system that cuts home heating and cooling bills while eliminating on-site emissions. The company has grown into the largest home geothermal provider in the U.S., installing thousands of systems and partnering with the nation's largest production homebuilders and multifamily developers to make geothermal a default option for new construction.
Housecall Pro
Housecall Pro is an all-in-one, cloud-based business management platform built for home service professionals - plumbers, electricians, HVAC techs, cleaners, and other tradespeople. It folds scheduling, dispatching, invoicing, payments, marketing, and customer management into a single mobile-first app, increasingly layered with AI tools that answer calls, book jobs, and answer accounting questions. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Denver, the company serves tens of thousands of service businesses and has powered well over 100 million completed jobs.
Runwise
Runwise is a New York-based smart-building company that retrofits aging heating, cooling, water, and electrical systems with proprietary wireless hardware, sensors, and cloud software. Its platform learns each building's behavior and automatically runs core systems at the minimum needed, cutting fuel use 20-25%, lowering carbon emissions, and helping owners comply with climate laws like NYC's Local Law 97. Used in over 10,000 buildings across the U.S., Runwise has saved customers more than $100 million in energy costs and positions itself as the operating system for buildings still running on 1960s technology.
Avoca
Avoca is a New York-based AI platform for America's services economy. It builds AI agents that answer calls, texts, chats and emails, book jobs, follow up on estimates and coach human reps for HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, pest control and other trades. Founded in 2022 by Tyson Chen and Apurva Shrivastava after a chance encounter with a Dallas HVAC company, Avoca pivoted from restaurants to the trades when it realized a missed call could mean losing a $30,000 install. In April 2026 it raised $125M+ across Seed, Series A and Series B at a $1 billion valuation, and is on track to book $1 billion in jobs in a single year.
Legence
Legence is North America's largest pure-play building performance platform, providing integrated advisory, engineering, design, fabrication, installation, and maintenance services for high-performance and mission-critical facilities. Formerly Therma Holdings and backed by Blackstone, the company brands itself the world's first Energy Transition Accelerator, helping data centers, healthcare, education, biopharma, semiconductor, and commercial real estate clients cut carbon, lower utility costs, and run buildings more efficiently. Legence went public on Nasdaq under the ticker LGN in September 2025.
BrightAI
BrightAI is a Palo Alto-based physical AI company building Stateful OS, a platform that pairs edge sensors, robots, and multimodal AI models to monitor, inspect, and maintain critical infrastructure - pipes, power grids, HVAC systems, and more. Co-founded in 2019 by SmartThings creator Alex Hawkinson, the company crossed $80M in revenue while bootstrapped before raising a $51M Series A in July 2025.
R-Zero
R-Zero is a San Francisco-based smart building technology company that started in the pandemic selling hospital-grade UV-C disinfection and pivoted to an IoT and AI platform that cuts HVAC energy use 20-40% by reading real-time occupancy across commercial and healthcare portfolios.