Lawrence, KS — January 2025 — Icorium, has been named one of 10 Kansas City Startups to Watch in 2025 by Startland News. In its tenth year, the Startups to Watch list highlights 10 emerging companies and entrepreneurs expected to make headlines in the coming year. The ten finalists each year are narrowed from around 60 nominations from trusted stakeholders in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Icorium is a climate tech startup and spinout of the Wonderful Institute for Sustainable Engineering at KU, with offices at KU Innovation Park in Lawrence. Icorium is pioneering a disruptive solution to a complex environmental problem: recycling end-of-life refrigerant.
With billions of pounds of high global warming potential (GWP) refrigerants in-use in the US today, it is important that society maximizes the recovery and reclamation of these critical materials to keep them out of the atmosphere. Unfortunately, most reclaimable refrigerant is vented at end of life, and much of what is recovered is either stockpiled or incinerated. This is because most refrigerants used in systems are actually complex mixtures of chemicals that are very difficult or impossible to separate. Icorium’s technology, first invented by researchers at KU, uses a specialized form of extractive distillation to efficiently separate even the most complex mixtures into their pure components so they can be reused or re-purposed. This process will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, minimize waste, and help industries comply with environmental regulations.
In 2024, Icorium achieved several significant milestones, including growing its team to eight employees, raising over $1M in pre-seed angel funding, and successfully demonstrated proof-of-concept for the technology’s use in refrigerant reclamation through a $275K STTR Phase I R&D grant from the National Science Foundation.
Looking ahead to 2025, Icorium hopes to receive its follow-on $1.25M NSF Phase II award in March, which will be a two-year effort to bring the technology to full commercial readiness through the development of a single-stream refrigerant reclamation process capable of separating any refrigerant mixture at industrial scale. In the near term, the company will bring the technology to market on a limited scale and has already begun the initial design and site selection process for a commercial demonstration plant, which is expected to separate more than 1 million pounds of refrigerant mixtures annually starting in 2026.
About Icorium
Icorium is a climate tech company developing and commercializing technologies to enable and incentivize true circular economies for refrigerants, propellants, and other complex chemical mixtures. To learn more about Icorium and its technology, or to inquire about demonstration plant partnerships, visit https://icoriumengineering.com/.