Across a scorching European summer, the least glamorous machines in the economy have been quietly straining. In cold stores and distribution depots, compressors run harder as the mercury climbs, pulling more power at exactly the hours power is dearest. It is a problem most operators have simply lived with.
Gyre Energy, an Oxford-founded energy tech company, has built a business on the wager that they no longer have to, and it has just raised more than $1.3m to prove the point at a far bigger scale.
The pre-seed round, a mix of investment and grant funding, was led by Speedinvest with participation from rule30 and Plug and Play. The money underwrites Gyre’s largest deployment to date, and its first with a global logistics leader, one of the world’s biggest movers and keepers of temperature-sensitive goods.
The customer cannot be named yet, citing commercial confidentiality, but the company will install its platform inside a chamber of a 140,000 square foot cold chain operation, with results measured against an IPMVP baseline.
The idea underneath is deceptively simple. Gyre’s software studies how a site behaves, forecasts when it will need cooling, and trims energy use without letting the temperature drift. Its thermal energy storage then does the clever part, banking cooling capacity when electricity is cheap and cleaner, and releasing it when prices spike, so the hardware runs least when running it costs most.
