pascal
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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.
Alexei Dunaway
Alexei Dunaway is the founder and CEO of Pinnacle, a New York and Palo Alto based startup building Pascal, an AI performance and career coach that lives inside Slack, Teams, and Zoom. A Stanford GSB graduate and Fulbright Scholar, he spent five years building an entrepreneur accelerator in Kenya before running an executive coaching practice for venture-backed founders. He now wants to give every worker the kind of coaching that used to be reserved for the C-suite. Pinnacle raised a $2.5M seed round in March 2025 led by eLab Ventures.