The Story of Blue Frontier: The Company Building the Future of Climate Control

The Story of Blue Frontier: The Company Building the Future of Climate Control

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Daniel Betts, CEO and Co-Founder of Blue Frontier, shared the unlikely origin story of how complaining about air conditioning led to a company that’s raised $47.8 million to reinvent it.

The Annoying Device That Wouldn’t Go Away

Daniel never planned to become an air conditioning entrepreneur. With a PhD in mechanical engineering and thermal sciences, he was building the future of clean energy—hydrogen fuel cells, lithium-ion batteries, electric vehicles.

But there was always this thing that kept breaking his projects.

“Air conditioning was always the thing that would turn on at the wrong time when it was hottest,” Daniel recalls. Every system would hit the same wall. Air conditioning would turn on when everything else ran at its worst. The grid would strain. Efficiency would plummet.

Most people would have moved on. Daniel couldn’t. “Air conditioning sizes, everything. So the entire grid, the entire power generation system is all sized to give you the power necessary for your air conditioners,” he explains. “Your average power is much smaller, much lower, but your peak power is much higher.”

Billions spent on infrastructure that sat idle most of the year, built solely to handle peak moments when air conditioners roared to life. Someone needed to fix this.

When the Lab Calls, You Answer

Daniel did what frustrated engineers do: he complained to anyone in the advanced energy space who would listen. What would it take to fix air conditioning?

Then, in 2017, his phone rang. It was the National Renewable Energy Labs. “Sign an NDA and come over to Colorado and we want to talk.”

What Daniel found changed everything. “Within a very short period of time, my friends and the folks at the National Labs, and the National Renewable Energy Labs in particular, had found the solutions,” Daniel remembers. They had actual technical solutions for almost everything he’d talked about.

And they wanted to give him a global exclusive license.

The Call That Changes Everything

Sitting in Colorado, holding knowledge that could reshape a $150 billion industry, Daniel faced the moment where possibility becomes responsibility.

On his way to the airport, he called his wife. “I think I’m going to become an entrepreneur and I’m going to start this company. And that means I’m bringing no money home for a while. What do you think?”

Daniel’s wife said yes immediately. They had the responsibility of knowledge.

Daniel called the best people he knew. Matt Graham, the best mechanical engineer. Dr. Matt Tillman, a thermal analysis expert. Greg Tropsa, who had already founded Ice Energy. They met at a Thai restaurant, laid out the opportunity, and shook hands.

Blue Frontier was born in December 2017.

The Patient Build

Where most hardware startups rush to raise venture capital, Blue Frontier moved deliberately. They secured grants from NYSERDA, Southern California Gas, and Oak Ridge National Labs. “Just enough money for us not to pay ourselves, but to reinvest into the company,” Daniel explains.

For two years, they advanced the technology. “We didn’t feel ready right at the beginning to raise venture with any sort of strength to negotiate a good equity deal,” Daniel notes.

The bet paid off. In 2019, they joined Rocky Mountain Institute’s third derivative. They raised $1.25 million on a convertible note, then $20 million in a Series A—all while maintaining control.

Why Three Times Better Matters

Daniel is ruthless about the bar for hardware success. “We’re three times the efficiency,” Daniel states flatly. “So now you’re in a very different world.”

But efficiency alone wasn’t enough. Blue Frontier’s liquid desiccant system controls humidity and temperature independently. It stores energy. It shifts load away from peak periods.

“Hard tech gives you that mode of technology that is very difficult for someone to come in and just copy and just implement around you,” Daniel explains. “You can create new services and growth spurts that you couldn’t follow with that conventional technology.”

They weren’t just making a better air conditioner. They were making one that changes the economics of the entire power grid.

The Human Experience

Daniel understood something many hardware founders miss: specifications matter, but experience matters more.

Blue Frontier’s independent control of humidity and temperature creates something visceral. “It just so happens that humidity control is more important to your comfort than temperature control,” Daniel reveals. “But temperature control is what the conventional air conditioner doesn’t do very well with. Humidity.”

The result? “No longer you have to wear a sweater when you walk into your office in the summer. No longer are you cold and sweaty at the same time.” Once you experience it, you can’t unsee the difference.

The Future: Utilities as Partners

Looking ahead, Daniel sees the distribution channel fundamentally changing. Today, air conditioners are sold through installers. Tomorrow, utilities themselves will provide air conditioning.

“Because air conditioning is the thing that sizes the entire infrastructure of the utility, it is very convenient for a utility to become involved in the provision of advanced energy, storing air conditioning into the market,” he explains.

The economics are compelling. Utilities can deploy energy storage through air conditioning faster and cheaper than batteries. “It will better for utility to become a hero of their community by providing people with the capacity to escape increasing temperatures with advanced air conditioning while at the same time making money off of it,” Daniel predicts.

It’s a vision of climate control as infrastructure—as fundamental to the grid as transmission lines. Air conditioning wouldn’t just consume power; it would enable renewable energy by storing it, shifting it, optimizing it.

From Complaint to Category

Blue Frontier started because Daniel couldn’t stop complaining about air conditioning. Seven years later, they’re not just building a product—they’re building the infrastructure for how cities will stay cool in a warming world.

The physics are unforgiving. The incumbents are massive. The market is over a century old. But Daniel and his team found what every category creator finds: the intersection of what’s physically possible and what the market desperately needs but doesn’t yet know how to ask for.

They’re not promising evolution. They’re delivering revolution, three times over.