New startup ideas · Physical world · Climate and energy
startup idea
Elastherm
A solid-state heat pump with no refrigerant that any electrician can install.
Elastherm builds a home heat pump around solid-state elastocaloric cores instead of compressed refrigerant, so installation needs no certified refrigerant handler, no lineset, and no permit-heavy outdoor unit.
- Hardware
- Consumer
- $100B+ market
- Collapses a cost 10x
- US first
3/5
venture judge
4
similar startups, last 2 years (26 all-time)
93%
of 1 nearest real companies still alive
yes
7 matching federal grants and programs
Direction supported by government programs and grants
Scorecard
One score that balances how trendy the idea is, the demand for it and its potential for 100x, with competition measured relative to every other idea in the catalog. Recent startup trends first, government priorities second.
55
Idea Score, 0-100 · raw 33.3 x 1.64
Active
competition: more crowded than 47% of ideas · headwind x0.76
+2.2
government priorities, secondary (7 matching grants)
Trend
30
Is the wave forming now? 2025-26 entrants vs 2023-24, rounds since 2025, the sector's live-batch direction, the 2026 trend analyst.
- Entrants 2025-26 vs 2023-24 (similar companies)2
- Rounds announced 2025+ in the sector68
- Sector direction (live batch)50
- 2026 trend analyst0
Demand
33
Does anyone want it? YC's current RFS, companies already paid for something similar, the operator judge, founders' yes-rate in decks, readers who would run the test.
- YC asks for it (current RFS: idea / sector)0
- Someone already pays (similar companies, recent / all-time)100
- Operator judge: real pain0
100x potential
68
Can it return a fund? The venture judge (double weight), market-size and moat axes, neighbours still alive, the technologist judge.
- Venture judge50
- Market size axis100
- Moat axis100
- Neighbours still alive30
- Technologist judge75
Score = 100 x cbrt(Trend x Demand x 100x) x (1 - 0.5 x crowding) + government bonus (max 5), calibrated so the 95th-percentile idea scores 90 (order never changes). A geometric mean: a weak pillar cannot be papered over. Percentiles are among the 272 ideas in the catalog; the terms matched were solid-state, heat, pump, refrigerant, electrician, install, builds, home.
The idea in full
- What
- Elastherm builds a home heat pump around solid-state elastocaloric cores instead of compressed refrigerant, so installation needs no certified refrigerant handler, no lineset, and no permit-heavy outdoor unit. HVAC contractors and electricians sell and mount it in an afternoon, collapsing the installed cost of switching a home off gas by an order of magnitude. Every unit ships enrolled in a demand-response fleet whose ML scheduler earns grid payments that offset the owner's bill.
- Why now
- EQUIUM in the PnP 2026 batch is commercializing thermoacoustic heat pumps for buildings, showing investors now back non-vapor-compression heating, and the 2024 cohort's 170 new climate companies included no one attacking the residential install-labor cost that keeps heat pump adoption flat.
- Wedge: first customer and entry point
- US electrical contractors in cold-climate states, seeded with a single-room replacement unit for electric-resistance baseboard homes where the operating-cost win is largest.
- Path to 100x
- Residential heating and cooling replacement is a $100B+ global market, and removing refrigerant collapses the install labor and permitting cost that today doubles or triples system price, the same cost wall that keeps gas furnaces in place. The moat compounds through the fleet: as neighborhood density of enrolled units grows, per-unit grid payments rise, so each installed Elastherm makes the next one cheaper to own in that territory, a network advantage no single-unit HVAC maker can copy.
- Ceiling
- Incumbent HVAC giants can bundle conventional heat pumps with financing through the same contractor channels, holding Elastherm to the premium retrofit niche if the solid-state cost curve stalls.
- Closest real companies, as the generator saw them
- EQUIUM uses thermoacoustics and targets the building sector through commercial channels; Elastherm targets homes through electrician channels with an elastocaloric core and a fleet revenue layer that EQUIUM does not have.
- Main risk
- Elastocaloric materials fail to reach compressor-level efficiency and durability at consumer price points after years of R&D.
Five judges
Each judge scores every idea in the catalog with a named rubric; the venture judge decides whether a card is shown at all (4-5 is venture-grade).
Venture investor
3/5
Elastocaloric cores plus a demand-response fleet is a genuine power-law swing at a $100B+ market, gated on materials hitting compressor-level durability.
Bootstrapper
1/5
Elastocaloric cores needing years of materials R&D before a single install is deep-tech capital a two-person team cannot cover.
Operator
1/5
Elastocaloric cores must first beat compressors on efficiency and durability, so this is a materials bet before it is a business.
Technologist
4/5
Elastocaloric cores are deep materials work where expertise compounds, discounted because compressor-level durability at consumer price points does not yet exist.
Risk
2/5
Everything depends on elastocaloric cores hitting compressor-level efficiency, a materials bet with no fallback after years of R&D.
trends
1/5
Elastocaloric cores with revenue after three-plus years of R&D have no 2026 dependency - this pitch read identically in 2023.
Similar startups in the directory
Companies whose pitch matches most of the idea's terms (solid-state, heat, pump, refrigerant, electrician, install, builds, home): 26 all-time, 4 from the last two years. Same matching as Idea Check.
AI technical support for complex physical products
autarc is the agentic OS for energy installers.
Tech-enabled heat pump contractor that cuts costs by 60%
Spruce is building an agentic operating system for heating installers.
Qeeper is building a home services platform that homeowners and property managers love.
Home electrification at $0 upfront cost
Clean Energy Partner for homeowners.
The AI operating system powering home services businesses
Humanoid robots that do your chores for the price of an iPhone!
Electric fleets park and charge anywhere with Curo
GeyserSteam™ | Premium Home Steam Room & Sauna Systems
The autopilot for home energy
The generator's reference companies
Real companies the model named as closest when it wrote the card, with their fate. A check mark is a company the radar could verify in its directory.
Public money in this direction
US federal grants, SBIR/STTR awards and open opportunities from the radar's public-money feed, matched to the idea's terms; the sector totals give the context.
7
grants and programs matching the idea
180
startup-relevant grants in Climate and energy
$155M
awarded in the sector, tracked
19
opportunities open now in the sector
- I-Corps: Translation Potential of a Longitudinal Diagnostic Method for Residential Branch Circuits Serving Sustained High Impact Electrical Loadsawardhigh relevance
National Science Foundation · I-Corps · $50K · posted 2026-08-19
- SBIR Phase II: Solid-State Heating and Cooling System Using High-Performance Thermoelectric Materialsawardhigh relevance
National Science Foundation · SBIR Phase II · $1M · posted 2026-07-28
- DEVELOPMENT & TESTING OF A NOVEL THERAPEUTIC DEVICE FOR IMPROVING MOBILITY IN PATIENTS WITH LOWER-EXTREMITY PERIPHERAL ARTERY DISEASEawardhigh relevance
NIH / NHLBI · SBIR phase II · $1M · posted 2026-08-01
- METAVEST: Advanced Biomimetic Personal Cooling for Enhancing Heat Safety Among High-Risk Workersawardhigh relevance
NIH / NIOSH · SBIR phase I · $302K · posted 2025-09-30
- Development and Feasibility Testing of PrivyPod - a modular bathroom to support aging in placeawardhigh relevance
NIH / NIA · STTR phase I · $398K · posted 2025-08-01
- Collaborative Research: Enabling Safe and Efficient Restoration of Drinking Water Systems through Multiphase Flow Modeling and Controlawardmedium relevance
National Science Foundation · ISP-Infrastructre Systms & Ppl · $316K · posted 2026-07-31
- NSF TTP-T: Transforming Energy Harvesting and Cooling: Breaking Performance and Cost Barriers of Thermoelectric Technology via High-Throughput Printingawardmedium relevance
National Science Foundation · Translation to Practice · $1M · posted 2026-04-30
Market signal
What the radar sees in Climate and energy: new companies by cohort year, the forming YC batch, and outcomes since the February snapshot.
Climate and energy · 92 → 112 → 184 → 97 → 32 new companies 2022 → 2026 · 91% aliveYC S26: 2 in this cluster, 1% of the batch (was 1% in X26) (F26 is still forming: 21 listed)Since February, of 118 YC companies here: 0 acquired, 2 shut down, 4 rewrote their pitch
Design attributes
The card is one cell of a designed set: every axis below was chosen before the text was written, and the text had to realize it.
- Buyer
- Consumer
- Business model
- Hardware
- Path to 100x
- Collapses a cost 10x
- Market size
- $100B+ market
- Capital intensity
- Capital-medium (ops, field teams)
- Speed to revenue
- R&D first, revenue after 3 years
- Technical depth
- Deep tech: ML, hardware, bio
- Go-to-market
- Partners and channels
- Moat
- Network effects
- Geography
- US first
- Regulation
- Some regulation
- Vibe
- Boring business
Listed under
An idea sits in its own sector and in any sector its text clearly touches.
More ideas like this
Physical world · Climate and energy
Kilobid
Licensed AI agent that bids your home battery, EV and thermostat into wholesale power markets.
Kilobid is a consumer app that links a household's utility account, battery, EV charger and thermostat through existing APIs, then runs an agent that decides hour by hour when to charge, hold or discharge and submits those decisions into wholesale and utility program markets.
Physical world · Climate and energy
GridStake
The marketplace where grid interconnection rights are priced, traded, and transferred.
GridStake is a US marketplace where data center developers, renewable developers, and industrial buyers purchase interconnection queue positions and grid capacity rights from projects that will never build.
Physical world · Climate and energy
Ampsite
Marketplace where industrial sites sell spare grid capacity to data center developers.
Ampsite lists industrial and brownfield sites in the US that already hold energized interconnection capacity they no longer use, scores each one for real deliverable megawatts using utility queue data, feeder models and on-site meter history, and matches them to colocation and AI compute developers hunting for power.
Physical world · Climate and energy
Ballast Compute
GPU capacity API that runs on curtailed and behind-the-meter power worldwide.
Ballast deploys containerised GPU pods with onboard batteries at sites with power that cannot reach the grid: curtailed wind and solar farms, flared gas, oversized industrial connections.
Physical world · Climate and energy
Kilowise
Spend management for electricity - FinOps for every meter an enterprise owns.
Kilowise is self-serve SaaS that ingests utility bills, interval meter data, and tariff structures for every site a global enterprise operates, then finds billing errors, picks better tariffs, and forecasts power spend and carbon per facility.
Physical world · Climate and energy
Gridpad
Pre-permitted containerized power blocks that cut bridge power cost for data centers tenfold.
Gridpad manufactures standardized 2 to 5 MW containerized power blocks that combine battery strings, inverters and a grid-parallel controller, and ships each unit with the emissions permit and type certification already cleared for its site class in the jurisdictions Gridpad has pre-qualified.
Fictional company written 2026-08-26 from MarkosWeb data; the companies, grants and numbers around it are real and tracked. Treat the idea as a research prompt, not a plan.