hvac
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Carrie Ruddy Sells the Climate Story One True Sentence at a Time
How a former bank communicator turned a maker of air conditioners into one of the more convincing climate stories in industrial America - and why she insists credibility is the only currency that matters.
Winston Chi
Winston Chi is the co-founder and CEO of NOSO Labs, a Y Combinator (Summer 2025) startup building AI agents that help home-services field technicians diagnose problems, close sales, and handle paperwork. A two-time founder focused on vertical AI, he previously started Butter Technologies, a food-wholesale software platform acquired by GrubMarket in 2024. With NOSO he is aiming the same playbook at the trades, starting with HVAC.
Evan Brown
Evan Brown is the CEO and co-founder of Rebar, a New York vertical-AI company building an operating system for the HVAC, electrical, and plumbing trades. Rebar's platform reads blueprints and spec books, pulls out tens of thousands of data points per project, and turns estimating and quoting work that once took days into a task of minutes. Brown grew up in his uncle's HVAC supplier office and later spent years as an estimator and sales engineer before starting Rebar in October 2024 with Andrew Schwartz. In March 2026 the company closed a $14M Series A led by Prudence.
James Metropoulos
James (Jim) Metropoulos is the founder and CEO of Blue Box Air, a Dallas-based clean tech company that has built a patented, bio-automated way to clean and restore the heat-transfer coils inside commercial HVAC systems. He founded the company in 2016 in Southern California and moved its headquarters to Deep Ellum, Dallas in 2020. His enzyme-based process tackles a century-old problem in the HVAC industry - coils that were never truly cleanable - and in doing so cuts building energy use, improves indoor air quality, and lowers carbon emissions. Blue Box counts clients such as MGM Resorts, UC Berkeley, General Motors, LA Children's Hospital and the Golden State Warriors, and reports having restored tens of thousands of coils while saving hundreds of millions of kilowatt-hours.
Jared Schwartzentruber
Jared Schwartzentruber is the founder and CEO of Prefix, a New York facility management platform that keeps the ovens, freezers, and HVAC humming for multi-site restaurant and retail chains like Chipotle, Bojangles, and Famous Footwear. A mechanical engineer trained at Purdue and Columbia, he traded bio-inspired robotics and a healthcare startup for the deeply unglamorous world of broken walk-in coolers, wagering that agentic AI plus a real service layer can cut a chain's maintenance costs by more than 15%. In April 2026 Prefix raised a $7.5M seed round to push toward 10,000 locations.
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.
Apurva Shrivastava
Apurva Shrivastava is the co-founder and Co-CEO of Avoca, a New York AI company that builds voice and workflow agents for home services businesses like HVAC, plumbing, and roofing contractors. An MIT computer science graduate and second-time founder who built AI products at Apple and engineered at Retool, he and co-founder Tyson Chen pivoted from restaurants to the trades after a chance encounter at a Texas conference. By 2026 Avoca had crossed a $1 billion valuation, 800-plus customers, and $125M-plus raised from Kleiner Perkins, Meritech, and General Catalyst.
Tyson Chen
Tyson Chen is the co-founder and co-CEO of Avoca, a New York based startup building AI agents that answer the phones, book jobs, and chase estimates for the trades - HVAC, plumbing, roofing, electrical. He met his co-founder Apurva Shrivastava at an MIT poker night, started out trying to save restaurants from missed calls, then pivoted after a Dallas heating-and-air company showed them that one missed call could mean a lost $40,000 install. In April 2026 Avoca raised a $125M+ Series B led by Meritech and General Catalyst at a $1 billion valuation.
Andrew Hosler
Andrew Hosler is the President and CEO of Performance Mechanical, Inc. (PMI), a leading industrial mechanical contractor headquartered in Pittsburg, California and a subsidiary of publicly-traded EMCOR Group. With over 23 years in construction and industrial contracting, Hosler rose from hands-on marine terminal maintenance crews to managing $1 billion in annual bid revenue as Chief Estimator, before taking the helm of PMI. Under his leadership, the company serves major clients in power generation, chemical, refinery, and water treatment sectors across California and Hawaii, employing approximately 750 skilled union tradespeople.
Jake Olsen
Jake Olsen, P.E. is the CEO of Stratus, the leading cloud software platform for MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) contractors, helping hundreds of firms digitize workflows from BIM design through fabrication to field installation. A serial entrepreneur with over 20 years in construction technology, Olsen previously co-founded DADO - a construction document management startup that was acquired by Stanley Black & Decker - and also built Hangerworks, DEWALT Design Assist, and Powercalc Anchor Design. He steered Stratus to a $32 million Series B funding round in January 2025 led by Radian Capital, positioning the company as the connective tissue between the design table, fabrication shop, and job site in the evolving era of data-driven MEP contracting.