Company: Temperate
Year Founded: 2024
Headquarters: Kidlington, Oxford, UK
Number of Full Time Employees: 4

Company Stage: Pre-seed
Are You Fundraising?: No
If 'Yes', For What Stage: N/A

Contact Info: [email protected]

 Temperate exists to deal with one of the biggest issues that the changing world is going to need to deal with — the problem of heat. The world’s getting hotter every single year, and heatwaves are breaking records around the world.

And yet the technology that we use to cool our homes, our offices, our industries hasn't changed since the 1900s. We are pioneering novel ways of cooling that use a fraction of the energy of traditional legacy cooling systems, but have just as much impact in terms of pure cooling.

 There’s only one direction of travel. The world’s getting hotter. The heat is baked into the system. Even if we stopped emitting CO2 today, there’s still so much heat in the oceans that we're gonna hit 2.5°C. Cooling technology is already nearing its limits in a lot of places, and so we need novel approaches to deal with it.

We’re already seeing that heat is having a major impact in industry and in homes. For example, in Europe, more people died in the past two years from heat death than died of gun violence in America, which is a abhorrent statistic just because we don’t have air conditioning, we don’t have good heat management practices or systems in place.

So there’s only one direction of travel. Climate change is going to make it hotter and hotter, and that’s only going to lead to more issues for people’s health and welfare — and then there are also major issues for productivity of society.

 Our CTO, Fergus, literally invented the technology that we’re using to do this cooling. There have been lots of people working on this in the past, but his approach is totally novel and not one that we’ve seen replicated around the world.

Me, myself, this is my third company, and I’ve spent the past five years working in complex technology, commercializing it, taking it to market.

So between the two of us and our COO, Sarah, we have an incredible capacity to take a completely new technology that we have developed in-house and bring it to the world.

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 Recently in the UK, there was an early summer heatwave in May with temperatures of over 35°C. It was so hot that supermarket fridges and freezers across the country just started to fail. They couldn’t eject heat effectively because it was just too hot outside.

What we’re doing with our first product, the NIX, is going to supplement those existing systems, augment them so they’re better able to stay up, increase the resilience of these systems, as well as lower the energy it costs to run them, so that supermarkets will have an easier time to keep providing chilled and frozen goods during a heatwave or just when it’s hot in general, which is a critical element of our food system.

 Our main customer for now is large supermarket chains, and [heat] is a problem that they’re already paying to solve.

If you look at the major supermarkets around the UK and Europe, anytime there’s a heatwave, they stop being able to sell goods because they have to throw them all out — because they can’t keep them frozen or refrigerated. They have to close shops because it’s too hot. And we’re already getting to the point where we’re having detailed conversations with supermarkets about what piloting this technology would look like and what integration with their systems would look like, because they see this problem so viscerally already.

They’re already looking at ways to solve it. So for us it’s less around knowing who the customer is or getting them to pay.

I’d say the biggest challenge for us is having a technology that’s based in somewhat esoteric physics. You know, talking about Mie Resonance and infrared light and atmospheric window. It’s all around how do you tell it in stories that people understand?

We all understand that on a clear night when we wake up in the morning, it’s colder. Well, that’s because the earth is radiating heat into space. We’ve seen a piece of metal glowing brightly — well, that’s because that metal is emitting heat as light. And so there are complex physics concepts that we have a shared and relatively common understanding of, and it’s how do you take this and make it something that people understand automatically?

 When we initially launched the company, our goal was to work on wall-mounted units, split-type AC-size units — something that someone could put in a home and provide a ton of cooling for 30 or 50 watts, and improve human welfare. That’s very much the goal. That’s where we want to go: pioneering cooling that really matters for people’s welfare.

But about six months ago, we realized that there were easier approaches that we could take, where there was still a big market for what we’re looking to do, and it was on the roadmap of getting towards those wall-mounted units, you know, that welfare cooling that we’re speaking about.

So that was probably the biggest one is making this pivot away from an idea and a concept that we’re fairly wedded to and we thought had a lot of societal good, but then also huge opportunity attached to it, and going towards something that was more focused, more achievable, but then also less exciting.

That was a hard step. But we knew that we weren’t giving up on that longer vision. This was just the stepping stone towards getting to that vision. It’s getting that first product out that helps supermarkets stay up that will help us get towards helping people stay cool.

 When I started my first company, my dad gave me a piece of advice. He was a tech founder in the '60s in Scotland and he said that everything will take three times longer than you expect. Even if you plan for it, it will still take three times longer than you expect.

It’s proven Cassandra-like true every, every single time. It’s always more difficult than you expect. It’s always more complicated than you expect. There’s that classic line: “We wouldn’t have tried it if we knew how difficult it was going to be.” Well, that’s just the job of being an entrepreneur. I think just accepting that it takes longer and there will be hiccups along the way — and that's fine. That’s part of the journey.

 I still see a lot of money flowing into SaaS-like products, which I think is an interesting piece considering what AI has done for the defensibility of SaaS products. I’m not sure pure SaaS plays are as valuable as they used to be, even though a lot of the capital allocators are still working within those modes and models.

And then the other one that I see is there’s a lot of innovation from a cooling perspective looking at data centers. Data centers are a very small part of the pie. They’re a sexy piece — because you can align your narrative towards it, but there’s really long lead times involved. They’re evolving so rapidly, and I’ve personally seen a couple of companies that have tried to get into the cooling for data center space just really struggling to get in there. And I don't think there’s as good of a mission involved as well.

I’d say I think one of the places that’s underplayed is welfare — people looking not just at adaptation towards climate change, but adaptation towards what the main driver of climate change is in terms of a welfare impact, and that’s heat, heat at the individual level.

One of the ways to think about cooling is that there’s no such thing as cooling. There’s no measurable measure of cooling.

If you talk to any thermal engineer and you use the word ‘cool’ or ‘cooling’, they’ll roll their eyes at you. All there is heat transfer. We cannot cool anything. All we do is we move heat around.

So all of the cooling technology that we have today — refrigeration and AC account for 20% of global electricity supply. None of that’s actually spent on cooling. All of that is spent on moving heat from place A to place B, with place B usually just being the outdoors. All we’re doing with our fifth of our total electricity budget is moving heat from places we don’t want it to be towards places we still don’t want it to be. We’re heating up the planet by moving our heat around.

What we’re doing at Temperate is rather than just ejecting heat outside your building or away from your refrigerator, is we’re sending it into space and it’s gone. We are cooling the actual planet by net removing heat from the planet. This, for us, is what’s so valuable about the technology. A lot of cooling technology right now, it doesn’t deal with the problem.

It just shifts the problem further down the line.

What are the barriers to adopting new forms of cooling technology in the retail and commercial markets?

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