Home-electrification startup Jetson just raised $50 million to fuel its ambitious effort to slash the cost of installing heat pumps in the U.S. and Canada.

Founded in 2024, Jetson says it can install the ultraefficient appliance for 30% to 50% less than competitors. The company has also developed its own smart heat pump, called the Jetson Air, which it unveiled last September. Currently, the startup operates in its home base of British Columbia, Canada, and in Colorado, Massachusetts, and New York, with over 1,000 heat-pump installations to date.

Jetson’s team, which has grown from 75 employees in September to 120 today, has extensive experience in designing consumer hardware. Co-founder and CEO Stephen Lake previously led smart-glasses startup North, which Google acquired in 2020. Several former North employees have joined Lake to work on home-electrification products.

The infusion of Series A funding will help Jetson continue to grow its team — and its market reach.

Jetson will use the investment to develop other home appliances, find ways to further reduce costs for consumers, and expand into new geographies, Lake said. The company plans to unveil a heat-pump water heater midyear.

As for geographic expansion, Jetson will prioritize regions where ​“the need for efficient heating is clear,” he said. ​“We’ll be in Washington state shortly and will be announcing new locations throughout the year.”

Funders flocked to the company in part because Jetson is pursuing ​“an absolutely massive market,” according to Ryan Gibson, an investor at Eclipse Ventures, which led the funding round. Roughly half the homes across the U.S. and Canada burn fossil fuels for heating, according to government data, and could switch to emissions-free heat pumps.

The market for the heating-and-cooling appliance is ripe for disruption, according to Gibson. The way that heat pumps are traditionally sold and installed is fragmented and low-tech, with little pricing transparency, he said. Contractors typically need to perform assessments in person in order to provide an estimate. By contrast, Jetson provides instant quotes online and at competitive prices that rival the cost of a furnace plus a conventional air conditioner.

On average, a Jetson system costs about $15,000 before local incentives, Lake said. That’s quite a departure from the national average. Using 2024 data, nonprofit Rewiring America estimated that for a medium-size home, a central heat-pump system costs a median of $25,000. (Jetson declined to share whether it’s currently profitable.)

To achieve those lower prices, Jetson takes a vertically integrated approach: from designing its software-enabled and sensor-equipped heat pump to having its own technicians roll up in one of the startup’s green electric trucks to install the appliance in a person’s home. The company also provides ongoing remote monitoring so that it can alert customers to quiet issues, like a dirty air filter that’s eroding performance.

In addition to Jetson, venture capitalists have backed a few other ​“heat-pump concierge” startups in recent years, though more modestly. Elephant Energy raised $3.5 million in seed funding in 2022; Tetra secured $10.5 million in seed money in 2023; and Quilt, which makes mini-split systems, added to a $33 million Series A with a $20 million Series B round in December.

Jetson’s funding round comes just after the U.S. government repealed a $2,000 tax credit for heat pumps, as well as subsidies for other efficiency upgrades, and as the nation struggles with rising energy bills. This presents a clear opportunity for firms like Jetson, which promise big cost savings over traditional installers. And with the new cash, the startup has a chance to deliver.

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See more from Canary Media’s ​“Chart of the Week” column.

Clean energy manufacturing was on the upswing in the U.S. Then the first year of Trump 2.0 happened.

After years of increasing investment in factories to make batteries, electric vehicles, solar panels, and more — a surge prompted by the Inflation Reduction Act — the trend reversed under the Trump administration last year. Companies spent a total of $41.9 billion on cleantech manufacturing facilities in 2025, down from $50.3 billion the year before, per fresh figures from the Clean Investment Monitor, a joint project from Rhodium Group and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.

More concerning, however, is the fact that businesses are making fewer new plans to invest in cleantech factories — and a whole lot of companies are backing out of prior commitments.

Cancellations nearly matched factory announcements last year: Firms unveiled a total of $24.1 billion in new cleantech manufacturing projects, but scrapped $22.7 billion worth.

It’s a dramatic reversal. The Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act had spurred well over $100 billion in cleantech manufacturing commitments through incentives for both factories and their customers, be they families in the market for an EV or energy developers building a solar megaproject. The ensuing boom in cleantech factory construction created thousands of jobs and caused overall manufacturing investment to soar. Most of the investment was planned for areas represented by Republicans in Congress.

But last year, the Trump administration put strict stipulations on incentives for factories and repealed many of the tax credits that helped generate demand for American-made cleantech. It also showed an astonishing hostility to clean energy projects — namely offshore wind — and cast a general cloak of uncertainty over the entire economy.

To be fair, other potential factors are at play.

Some of the slowdown in cleantech factory investment could simply be the market maturing. Plenty of projects announced right after the Inflation Reduction Act might already be online, or close to it. Or it could be the result of the gravitational pull of the data center boom, which is attracting gobsmacking amounts of capital that could have otherwise financed more cleantech factories.

But either way, as the new data shows, the Trump administration has weakened the case for investing in expensive projects tied to clean energy. I’m willing to bet that the consequence will be more factory cancellations — and less investment — over this year, too.

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This analysis and news roundup come from the Canary Media Weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it every Friday.

When it comes to state politics, 2026 is already in full swing. As legislators reconvene and new governors are sworn in, it’s becoming clear that leaders will focus on one energy issue in particular this year: affordability.

While last year’s elections didn’t bring any major changes to the White House or Congress, skyrocketing energy prices played an undeniable role in propelling Democrats to victory in state elections across the country.

Take a look at New Jersey, where Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill was sworn in this week after campaigning on a promise to lower power prices while building out clean energy. She took her first steps in that direction on Tuesday, signing executive orders to accelerate solar and storage development, consider freezing electricity rate hikes, and expand utility bill credits for customers.

Those credits will be funded in part by the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, an East Coast carbon market that saw good news with the inauguration of Virginia Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger this past weekend. Spanberger is already moving to rejoin RGGI, with an assist from the state’s Democratic-controlled legislature, after the previous Republican governor pulled Virginia out of the program back in 2023. On her first day in office, Spanberger also directed state agencies to find ways to curb energy and other household costs.

Affordability is sure to continue to dominate politics this year in Virginia, also known as the data center capital of the world, clean energy advocates recently told Canary Media’s Elizabeth Ouzts.

“Oftentimes, I go into a legislative session sort of just guessing what people are going to care about,” said Kendl Kobbervig of Clean Virginia. Not this year.​“No. 1 is affordability, and second is data center reform.”

Massachusetts’ legislature shares that priority, reports Canary Media’s Sarah Shemkus. But even though the statehouse remains firmly in Democratic hands, lawmakers aren’t aligned on how to curb costs in the long term. Some are targeting volatile natural gas prices and the cost of replacing aging pipelines, others say clean energy and transmission construction are to blame, and still others are homing in on utility profit margins.

The reality is that the energy affordability crisis isn’t a problem with just electricity prices or natural gas prices; both are rising at rates higher than inflation across the country. And so it’s going to take strong, and perhaps creative, solutions to keep them in check.

More big energy stories

Trump’s year of energy upheaval

It’s been a year since President Donald Trump took office for the second time, and there’s been no shortage of energy-industry shake-ups in the months since.

On his first day in office, Trump called out rising power demand and declared a national emergency on energy, which he has since used to justify keeping aging coal plants open long past their retirement dates.

His signature spending law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, gutted tons of clean energy tax incentives. And that’s not to mention the administration’s decarbonization funding clawbacks, its holdup of renewables permitting, and its relentless attacks on the nation’s offshore wind industry.

Trump’s year-two agenda is already starting to take shape. Expect to see his administration order more coal plants to stay open, cancel additional clean energy funding, and throw up hurdles we can’t even imagine yet.

Geothermal is having a moment

As clean energy sources like offshore wind and solar struggle to snag a foothold in the new, post–tax credit world, geothermal proved this week that it still has the juice.

A wave of announcements from pioneering geothermal startups began on Wednesday, with Zanskar announcing it had raised $115 million in a Series C funding round. It’ll use the infusion to expand its AI software, which it used to uncover an untapped, invisible geothermal system in Nevada last year. Also on Wednesday, Sage Geosystems announced a more than $97 million Series B round, which will fund its first commercial-scale power generation project, slated to come online this year.

Fervo Energy completed the trifecta as it quietly filed for an IPO, Axios Pro reported on Thursday. The company hasn’t shared details about the filing, but said in December that it had raised about $1.5 billion so far in its quest to build a massive enhanced geothermal system in Utah.

Clean energy news to know this week

Back to work: Wind farms off the coasts of New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia have all restarted construction after legal wins last week against the Trump administration’s stop-work order, though two other projects remain paused. (Canary Media)

Solar keeps surging: An Energy Information Administration analysis finds utility-scale solar is the fastest-growing power generation source in the U.S., and will continue to expand through 2027 as the shares of coal and gas in the energy mix decline. (EIA)

Rural resilience: North Carolina towns devastated by 2024’s Hurricane Helene are installing solar panels and batteries at community hubs to prepare for future disasters, with help from a program that could become a national model. (Canary Media)

Clean-steel influencers: A new report shows automakers buy at least 60% of the primary steel made in the U.S., which gives them leverage to push steelmakers to clean up production. (Canary Media)

Batteries at breakfast: A Brooklyn bagel shop is cutting its power bills by using suitcase-size batteries to run its oven and fridges when electricity demand is high. (Canary Media)

Renewables’ European win: Wind and solar generated 30% of the EU’s electricity last year, while fossil fuels provided 29%, marking the first time renewables have beaten coal, oil, and gas. (The Guardian)

Clawback consequences: Some communities that lost federal climate grants last year have sued to reclaim them, while others have had to move on from projects that would’ve helped them curb pollution and adverse health effects. (Grist)

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