Cambridge spin-out Barocal raises €8.5 million to commercialise…

Team S · 2026-05-07T14:38:22.000Z

Barocal, a University of Cambridge spin-out developing refrigerant-gas-free heating and cooling systems, has raised €8.5 million ($10 million) in a seed round. Investors include World Fund, Breakthrough Energy Discovery, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, and IP Group, which contributed £2 million. The funding will be used to scale operations, recruit senior technical and commercial talent, and accelerate the development of the company's systems ahead of commercial deployment. Founded in 2019 by Professor Xavier Moya, Barocal is built on over 15 years of research into caloric materials at Cambridge. The company has developed and patented a platform technology based on barocaloric materials — organic solid-state materials that heat and cool when subjected to pressure, through a process called pressure-driven phase transitions. This approach eliminates the need for conventional refrigerant gases, which are responsible for significant global warming when they leak, and are used in today's vapour-compression systems that underpin air conditioning and refrigeration worldwide. Barocal's system is designed to be more efficient and less expensive than these century-old alternatives. The company won the $1 million 2025 TERA-Award for its work. Barocal will initially target data centre cooling and commercial refrigeration — two of the fastest-growing applications — as entry points into the global HVAC market, currently valued at around $450 billion and projected to reach $577 billion by 2033. The heating and cooling sector accounts for approximately 15% of annual global greenhouse gas emissions, a higher proportion than aviation. Cooling alone produced more than 4 gigatonnes of CO₂ equivalent in 2022, and demand is expected to triple by 2050. Moya has said the company's materials could play a decisive role in reaching global climate targets, arguing that solving heating and cooling emissions could account for roughly half the emissions reductions needed to stay within a 1.5°C pathway. The seed round positions Barocal to move from validated laboratory science toward scaled engineering and real-world deployment.

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Cambridge spin-out Barocal raises €8.5 million to commercialise… | Newnex