Karman Industries hopes its SpaceX-inspired heat pumps will replace industrial boilers

Industrial heat, which is used by companies as diverse as breweries and food processors to chemical manufacturers and paper mills, is one of the last bastions of fossil fuels. After all, it’s pretty hard to beat a flame when you need to heat something up.

But recently, a slew of startups have started exploring ways to make heat using electricity. Some, like Rondo, Antora, and Fourth Power, rely on cheap wind and solar to heat specialized bricks to thousands of degrees, storing the thermal energy for later use. Others, like Skyven Technologies, have developed industrial-scale heat pumps that use a series of compressors to achieve the desired temperature.

Heat pumps are particularly suited to supplying the not-quite-searing heat used by food and beverage manufacturers. New Belgium Brewing, for example, agreed last year to install a 650-kilowatt heat pump boiler from AtmosZero at its Colorado headquarters.

That’s exactly the sort of installation targeted by Karman Industries, a heat pump startup that until now had operated in stealth. To replace industrial boilers, the company draws inspiration from SpaceX’s rockets, co-founder and CEO David Tearse told TechCrunch.

“On the technology side, what we’re building is much more akin to a Raptor engine in terms of speed, pressure, and temperature,” he said.

Like other heat pumps, Karman uses compressors to transfer heat. But unlike the refrigerator in your kitchen, which uses a more prosaic compressor, Karman will use turbomachinery to get the job done.

Turbomachinery, which can spin at incredible speeds, is widely used in rockets to pump fuel. Turbomachinery isn’t yet common in heat pumps, though another startup, Evari, is developing one for use in homes and electric vehicles.

Inside a heat pump, the turbomachinery’s speed helps minimize the device’s footprint, moving the same amount of heat as typical compressors, but in a smaller package. Karman’s largest compressor will fit in a frame up to eight feet long and six feet in diameter. Smaller models will be about four to five feet long and two to three feet in diameter. None of them will require oil, a necessity for most other heat pumps, which simplifies the design and maintenance.

Heat pumps can typically only “lift” the temperature so much. So to get to the sorts of temperatures required by industrial users, even those needing only low-grade heat -- up to 150 degrees Celsius -- heat pump manufacturers generally string a series of compressors together, each lifting the heat a portion of the total. Each additional compressor adds cost and complexity.

“Compared to other systems that are out there, to do the same amount of lift that would take them about five or six stages, we can do in one or two,” Tearse said.

Karman already has some experience in industrial heat courtesy of co-founder and CTO Chiranjeev (CJ) Kalra, who was formerly head of technology at Antora and vice president of power generation at Heliogen. Tearse previously worked at aviation startup Skyryse and Riot Ventures, where Karman was incubated. Riot led a $4 million pre-seed investment in Karman with participation from Space VC, the company exclusively told TechCrunch.

Though it’s still early for the company, Tearse said that he’s confident that the company’s first model, Thermal01, will be cost competitive with natural gas in certain regions and for certain processes. He anticipates a pilot will be ready to install on a customer site in the first half of 2026.