Company: ChillSkyn
Year Founded: 2023
Headquarters: Montreal, Canada
Number of Full Time Employees: -

Company Stage: Seed
Are You Fundraising?: N/A
If 'Yes', For What Stage: N/A

Contact Info:

 Every generation has a problem it needs to solve. Ours happens to be how to deal with heat. Not just the heatwave-in-the-summer kind of heat, but the kind of heat that buckles highways, that strains power grids, that destroys food in our cold chain.

To date, our society’s answer to that has been more air conditioning, more compressors, more energy — more, more, more.

But what if there was a way to prevent this heat from forming in the first place? That’s what we’re doing here at ChillSkyn. We’ve developed this advanced material that allows sun-exposed surfaces to stay 6°C below ambient [temperatures] without using any energy. It’s part of a family of product that’s called passive radiative cooling.

In fact, the World Economic Forum called passive radiative cooling one of the top 10 technologies to watch out for in 2026. Now, we did not invent passive radiative cooling. It’s a physical phenomenon, and it’s existed as long as there’s been a blue sky above our head. What we’ve done is developed a way to deploy it at scale. That’s what’s making the difference here, and that’s the challenge we’re trying to solve.

 With increased extreme heat events, there’s more and more demand for cooling. And in our beachhead — which is the refrigerated transportation space — what it means is running trailer compressors harder, causing deviation in temperature inside the boxes, causing cargo losses, and food losses.

As more and more extreme heat events [occur], this is becoming more and more challenging for these users, and they’re burning more and more diesel to keep the contents [of their refrigerated transports] cold.

 I'm going to switch up the question a bit. I don’t think it’s me as a founder that’s making the difference. We’ve built an incredible team. We’ve spent tremendous amounts of time not just understanding our solution, but understanding our customers’ systems and really understanding the impact we’re having on those systems.

You can have the best solution in the world, but if you don’t understand the interaction between your solutions and your customers’ systems and how that can come together to bring real benefit — that’s where problems don’t get solved, and that’s where solutions fail.

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Our advanced material allows sun-exposed surfaces to stay 6°C below ambient temperature without using any energy. It achieves this by having two physical phenomena coexisting that normally don’t coexist within one material.

First, the material is highly emissive. We have a material that emits heat naturally, really, really, well. Every object in the universe emits heat. Ours happens to be effective — very, very effective — at emitting heat. The challenge is that most highly emissive material are bad reflectors. So what we’ve done is we’ve engineered a highly emissive material to be naturally highly reflective.

In fact, it reflects almost all of the solar energy across the entire solar spectrum. [For example], the white paint behind me would reflect about 75% of solar energy — most of the visual light — which is why we see it as white. But it is not as good on the infrared and the UV.

Our coating can reflect as much as 97.5% of solar radiation across the entire spectrum, meaning we only absorb 2.5%, 10 times less than white paint. And the 2.5% that gets absorbed is less than the natural emittance of the material, so we keep emitting more heat than the 2.5% that gets absorbed. That leads to a net negative heat balance.

We shed more heat all the time than we absorb, which means we can stay at sub-ambient [temperatures]. In our customer’s systems, less heat load means less temperature load on the boxes, less runtime of the refrigeration units, less high RPM, less wear and tear on the equipment, and less fuel use

 In our beachhead, our customers are refrigerated transportation fleets. These are folks that are carrying food or pharmaceuticals from point A to point B. These folks burn a lot of diesel to keep the contents [of their vehicles] cold — about $10,000 to $12,000 a year in diesel just to keep the contents of a trailer cold over a year.

With extreme heat events, they’re [also] actually having challenges where sometimes the equipment just can’t keep up with the heat and they lose cargo because of these excursions into super high temperatures. So convincing them they have a problem is not that hard.

The solution historically has been to just run the equipment harder, which reduces the lifespan of the equipment.

What we’ve spent a lot of time understanding is the data behind that. How do we look at the data to properly show real return on investment for our customers?

The returns [we’ve calculated] are phenomenal depending on the geography they run in and the age of their box. The payback [period] can be sub-12 months. It’s typically a 12-18 month return on investment for that project, so a very, very compelling ROI. It also saves about five tons of CO2 per year per trailer they have.

So a fleet that has, say, 1,000 refrigerated trailers in their fleet can save 5,000 tons of CO2 a year by rolling out our solution across their fleet.

  The hardest part is actually not our solution itself. We reduce thermal load on systems, and if there’s less thermal load, then there’s less cooling required. That part is simple. What’s the hardest [part] in the environment we work in — the refrigerated trailer space — is that all these trailers run at varying efficiencies as a baseline within a fleet.

There’s a lot of variables that affect how these trailers operate, from what geography they run in, to the age of the boxes, to the efficiency within the controllers, to the software that’s in the controller, to operator behavior, [and] how the drivers operate these. So one of the challenges is to first collect the proper data to show them the real impact.

I think that’s where we’ve done something pretty special, and we have a team that can really help the customer understand their own data so that they can make better-educated decisions that drive the right behavior change.

 There’s been a lot of things we had to solve for in the way we scaled the technology and in the way we deployed it at scale in the field. But I don’t think I was ever close to giving up.

What keeps me motivated are two [things].

One is the problem we’re solving is a real issue. We will have to deal with extreme heat events. Resiliency through climate change is a real thing and we need to solve for it. That drives me and that drives the rest of our team.

The second part is we’ve built this incredible team of people that are passionate about changing the way the world thinks about cooling.

Engineers, polymer scientists, experts in their field on the operations side, on the scientific side, with the one common thread that they’re all very, very passionate about what we’re doing. That’s what keeps me going — the challenge that we’re solving is so big that finding the motivation isn’t hard.

 I think it’s important to recognize that we go through economic cycles and geopolitical cycles that changes how businesses make decisions regarding climate adaptation. Ultimately, we’ll have to do something, but as we all know, there’s periods of times where there’s more headwinds and periods of time where there’s more tailwinds.

I think what I’ve learned over the last few years is that you need to have a solution that is helping solve for climate adaptation and climate change resiliency, but that your solution needs to also have good unit economics. You need to have solutions that allow people to be excited about it, whether it’s to reduce their CO2 footprint, whether it’s to protect the heat load on their system and the cargo they transport, or whether they’re just trying to bring a compelling ROI to their business.

If you can find solutions that are not just helping on the climate resiliency but also providing compelling ROI, that’s where the magic is, and that’s where the solution takes off. That’s been our experience.

 That’s an interesting question! As a CEO of a climate tech start-up, you do have to worry and spend time on financing, obviously, [but I’m] probably not spending enough time outside of our own ecosystem to understand the places where it should flow that it’s not [currently].

I have to say that the investment community has been incredibly supportive of what we’re trying to do. We have a compelling solution with compelling unit economics and that’s working.

 Ultimately, ChillSkyn isn’t a refrigerated transportation solution company — our solution is actually much broader than this. We picked the refrigerated transportation space as our beachhead for many reasons. One, the unit economics are compelling for our solution. We have some unfair advantages in our solution that makes it really well-tailored for the transportation space.

We don’t make cooling equipment — our job is not to cool the world. What we do is we make cooling more efficient, more resilient, more affordable, and more approachable. We help cooling systems keep up with the demand of this warming world. And we’re looking continuously for more opportunities to help in our beachhead first, but then move on to the other systems to keep changing the way the world thinks about cooling.

What other applications of efficient cooling technology are going overlooked in the market right now?

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