Used by businesses ranging from breweries and food processing companies to chemical manufacturers and paper mills, industrial heat is one of the last bastions of fossil fuels. After all, if you need to heat something, nothing beats a flame.
But recently, a number of startups have begun exploring ways to use electricity to create heat. Companies like Rondo, Antora, and Fourth Power are using cheap wind and solar power to heat special bricks to thousands of degrees, then storing the thermal energy for later use. Companies like Skyven Technologies are developing industrial-scale heat pumps that use a series of compressors to achieve the desired temperature.
Heat pumps are particularly well-suited to providing the less-scorching heat used by food and beverage manufacturers: New Belgium Brewing Co., for example, agreed last year to install a 650-kilowatt heat-pump boiler from Atmos Zero at its Colorado headquarters.
That's exactly the kind of installations that Karman Industries, a previously secretive heat-pump startup, is targeting to replace industrial boilers, co-founder and CEO David Tearse told TechCrunch.
“In terms of technology, what we're developing is very similar to the Raptor engine in terms of speed, pressure and temperature,” he said.
Like other heat pumps, the Karman uses a compressor to transfer heat, but unlike your kitchen refrigerator, which uses a more mundane compressor, the Karman uses turbo machinery to transfer heat.
Turbomachinery, which can spin at incredible speeds, is widely used as fuel pumps for rockets. They're not yet common in heat pumps, but another startup, Evari, is developing heat pumps for use in homes and electric vehicles.
Inside the heat pump, the speed of the turbomachinery minimizes the equipment footprint, allowing it to move the same amount of heat as a typical compressor in a smaller package. Karman's largest compressors fit into frames up to 8 feet long and 6 feet in diameter. Smaller models are about 4 to 5 feet long and 2 to 3 feet in diameter. No oil is required, as is required with most other heat pumps, simplifying design and maintenance.
Heat pumps are typically limited in how much temperature they can “lift,” so to reach the temperatures required by industrial users (even if they only need low heat, like 150 degrees Celsius), heat pump manufacturers typically chain together a series of compressors, each one lifting a portion of the total heat. Each additional compressor adds cost and complexity.
“Compared to other systems out there today, instead of five or six stages to get the same amount of lift, we can get it down to one or two stages,” Tiers says.
Kalman already has experience in industrial heating thanks to co-founder and CTO Chiranjeev (CJ) Kalra, who previously served as head of technology at Antra and vice president of power generation at Heliogen. Tiers previously worked at aviation startup SkyRise and Riot Ventures, where Kalman was incubated. Riot led a $4 million pre-seed investment in Kalman with participation from Space VC, the company told TechCrunch exclusively.
It's still early days for the company, but Tiers said he's confident its first model, Thermal01, will be cost-competitive with natural gas in certain regions and for certain processes. He expects the pilot will be ready to be installed at customer sites in the first half of 2026.