Qurie, a Freiburg-based startup developing next-generation electrocaloric cooling systems, today announced that in April 2026, High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), Technology Transfer Fund TT49 and Aepikur GmbH invested €2.2 million in the company as part of a Seed funding round.
The company develops electrocaloric refrigeration systems that operate without compressors, refrigerants or pressure build-up: quieter, more efficient and more sustainable than anything previously possible.
“The HVAC industry is facing a fundamental transformation – regulatory, technological and economic. We have reached a point where we can demonstrate that our technology not only works, but also makes economic sense. This is the moment we have been working towards,” said Dr Christian Vogel, CEO and co-founder, Qurie.
Qurie was founded in 2026 as a spin-off of the Fraunhofer Institute for Physical Measurement Techniques IPM in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, by Dr Vogel (CEO) and Dr Kilian Bartholomé (CTO).
The company pointed out that traditional refrigeration systems are based on a 19th-century principle: the compression and evaporation of refrigerants. The EU F-Gas Regulation is establishing an end date for this method, but alternatives like magnetocaloric or elastocaloric cooling have so far failed to achieve competitive total operating costs, stated Qurie.
The German startup employs a fundamentally different method: electrocaloric materials, including specific ceramics and polymers, alter their temperature when an electric field is applied or removed. Qurie explains that it harnesses this reversible physical effect in precisely stacked material structures to build complete refrigeration systems, without a compressor, without refrigerants, with minimal mechanical components.
At the core of this technology is a globally patented active electrocaloric heat pipe (AEH), developed and tested at Fraunhofer IPM for more than ten years. The theoretical efficiency of these systems is over 80%, while traditional compressors max out at about 50%, indicating a potential energy saving of approximately 40%.
“With our heat pipe approach, we transfer heat within the system very efficiently and can achieve significantly higher pumping frequencies than previously possible with liquid-based heat transport. This is what makes our technology genuinely competitive for the first time,” Dr Bartholomé, CTO and co-founder, Qurie.
Employing more than ten experts at its Freiburg location, the company aims to transform global HVAC infrastructure. The miniaturisable solid-state architecture enables entirely new form factors: from chip cooling and portable medical devices to automotive and building technologies, notes Qurie.
The startup’s first target market is industrial enclosure cooling, a segment with high precision requirements and no fully satisfactory solution currently available. From there, Qurie plans to expand into commercial refrigeration, medical technology, electronics and automotive. Development will be further supported until the end of 2026 by a research programme funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWE).
Source: EU-Startups
