refrigeration
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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.
Amrit Robbins
Amrit Robbins is the CEO and co-founder of Axiom Cloud, a San Jose-based AI-powered refrigeration management software company serving grocery chains and cold storage operators. A Stanford-trained engineer and Forbes 30 Under 30 alumnus, Robbins previously co-founded Axiom Exergy — a hardware-first thermal energy storage company — before pivoting to software in 2020 with Axiom Cloud. His work addresses refrigerant leaks, which rank #4 on Project Drawdown's climate impact list, with a platform that requires no new hardware, deploys remotely, and earns payback in under a year.
Manik Suri
Manik Suri is the Founder & CEO of GlacierGrid (formerly Therma), a San Francisco-based climate tech company that uses AI, IoT sensors, and intelligent controls to cut energy waste from refrigeration and cooling systems - responsible for nearly 10% of global emissions. A Harvard and Cambridge alumnus who once worked at D.E. Shaw and the White House National Economic Council, Suri pivoted from policy and finance to build tech that keeps food cold, businesses profitable, and the planet a degree cooler. GlacierGrid counts McDonald's, 7-Eleven, Domino's, and Marriott among its clients, has raised over $29 million in funding, and was named one of TIME's America's Top GreenTech Companies for 2025.