Hero slot — Wefunder places the founder video or a 16:9 image here
Highlights
- ✓98 million U.S. air-conditioning and heat-pump systems. About 22.5 million are under a service contract. None are watched between visits
- ✓The Vigil monitors 27 parameters continuously and reports to the contractor who services the equipment, not the manufacturer who sold it
- ✓Four HVAC contractors committed to paid pilots, three in Kansas and one in Atlanta
- ✓$99 onboarding fee recovers most of the hardware at install. $240 of recurring revenue per unit per year
- ✓Gen 1 hardware is built. Fully U.S. supply chain inside a 20-mile radius. Zero tariff exposure
- ✓Third venture for the founder. Sold Horizon Internet Technologies in 1997, sold the core product line of Inno-Labs in 2013
The industry attempts predictive maintenance with two visits a year
A service agreement buys the property owner a spring visit and a fall visit. A technician shows up, checks the equipment against the numbers printed on its nameplate, replaces a filter, and drives away. That is two days of visibility. The other 363 days, nobody is watching.
Refrigerant leaks slowly. Bearings wear gradually. A capacitor weakens over months. None of that announces itself on the day a technician happens to be standing in front of the unit. It announces itself in July, at 4pm, on the hottest day of the year, as an emergency call.
Two days of visibility. 363 days of drift.
The HVAC industry attempts predictive maintenance with two service visits a year. Everything between them is unwatched.
Emergencies are a bad business model, and contractors know it
Emergency work is how most HVAC contractors meet new customers, and the call itself is often close to breakeven. It arrives at nights, on weekends, and during heat waves, when there is no capacity left. It disappears in the shoulder seasons, when the trucks sit still.
Up to 11 Marketing ran contractor research for Corus, interviewing four service operators of different sizes in different markets. The Vigil was never mentioned. Every one of them, unprompted, described the same wish: less reacting, more scheduled work, more predictable revenue. Maintenance-contract adoption sits in the 30 to 40 percent range. Contractors know recurring revenue is the answer. They have never had a reason to put in front of a customer.
Peaks that bury you. Valleys that bleed you.
Emergency work arrives when there is no capacity to serve it, and disappears when the trucks are sitting still.
Meet the Vigil
The Vigil monitors vapor-compression air-conditioning and heat-pump systems in real time. It installs non-invasively in about 30 minutes, reads 27 parameters continuously across five sensing domains, and learns each unit’s real-world behavior rather than relying on the nameplate alone.
A slow leak, a fouling coil, the first signature of compressor wear. All of it becomes visible in March, when it can become scheduled service in April instead of an emergency in July.
Hardwired. No batteries to change, no separate sensor kit. Installation uses service-port pass-throughs, clamp-on current sensors, and taped thermistors, so nothing breaches the sealed refrigerant system. The manufacturer’s warranty stays intact. That one fact removes the single largest objection a contractor raises.
27 parameters, five domains, continuously
24 hardwired board inputs map to 27 monitored parameters, because three combination sensors capture both temperature and humidity.
Depth is the whole argument
A single pressure reading tells a contractor that something is off. Superheat plus subcooling plus discharge temperature plus ambient conditions tell him what is wrong before the truck rolls. That is the difference between a diagnosis and a guess, and it is the difference between one visit and two.
A pressure reading says something is off. Four readings say what it is.
Fault-to-cause specificity is the wedge. It is what makes a first-time fix possible instead of a second truck roll.
The third row is the one contractors react to. A restriction reads like an undercharge, so the wrong part goes on the truck.
Every Vigil calculates superheat and subcooling continuously. Most technicians skip that math under time pressure. That is why the data has to be this deep. Light-touch sensing and a thermostat can tell you a house is not cooling. They cannot tell you the filter-drier is restricted rather than the charge being low. Getting that backwards puts the wrong part on the truck.
We own the hardware. They subscribe.
The HVAC service contractor is the customer. He pays $99 per system at installation and $20 per month after that, on a one-year minimum term. He never buys equipment, because Corus owns the hardware for the life of the subscription. The property owner does not transact with Corus at all; the contractor installs the device and folds monitoring into the service offering he already sells every spring.
We own the hardware. They subscribe.
The HVAC service contractor subscribes. The property owner never transacts with Corus, and there is no equipment for anyone to buy.
A letter of intent for 25 units waives the onboarding fee. It can flex for a promotion or to close a hesitant owner.
The $20 recurring price is the number that drives the multiple, so it is the one number the business does not discount.
This is the single biggest reason the adoption curve is real. Corus is not creating a new line item or a new buying conversation. The service agreement is already sold. The Vigil adds one line to it.
Owning the hardware is the advantage, not the drag
The usual objection to a hardware company is that every new customer consumes cash. The $99 onboarding fee answers that. A Vigil costs $120 fully loaded. The fee recovers roughly 80 percent on the day it goes on the wall, leaving about $21 of net exposure per unit and roughly a month to full recovery. Against $240 of annual recurring revenue, the math looks like a setup fee plus a subscription.
Owning the hardware stops being a capital drag
The onboarding fee recovers most of the hardware on the day it is installed, so the model reads as a setup fee plus a subscription.
The fee also flexes. Waive it against a letter of intent for 25 units. Cut it for a timed promotion. The $20 recurring price never moves. That is the number that drives the multiple, so it is the one number that stays fixed.
The service contracts already exist
There are roughly 98 million vapor-compression systems installed in the United States and about 117,000 HVAC companies servicing them. Across communities of 5,000 people or more, that works out to an average of about 25 contractors per town, with almost nothing to separate one from another. Around 22.5 million of those systems are already under an active service contract, which is the serviceable base the Vigil is priced against.
98 million systems. None of them are being watched.
Sized at $240 per unit per year. The service agreements already exist, so this is one line added to a conversation contractors have every spring.
Three years ago, none of this was true
A regulatory reset, a refrigerant cost shock, a deepening technician shortage, and a wave of private-equity consolidation all landed at once. The Vigil answers all four: leak detection on flammable refrigerant, labor-saving dispatch, and recurring revenue that raises what a contractor’s business is worth when he sells it.
Three years ago, none of this was true
Four external shifts landed at once, and Corus caused none of them.
Since January 2025, new U.S. residential systems cannot be built with R-410A. They ship with mildly flammable A2L refrigerant and the leak detection it requires. The Vigil reads that alarm.
R-454B is up more than 300%. R-410A has roughly doubled. A slow leak stopped being a rounding error, and catching it early pays for the monitoring.
A structural shortage makes every truck roll count. Emergency dispatch burns the trade's scarcest resource; scheduled work conserves it.
Private equity is rolling up the trade, and buyers pay more for contracted recurring revenue than for one-off calls.
The biggest competitor never enters the bake-off
The status quo is twice-yearly visits, paper service agreements, and reactive dispatch. It has zero switching cost and enormous inertia, and it holds the largest share of a contractor’s minutes by a wide margin. Making its 363-day gap visible is most of the sales job.
SmartAC.com is the closest direct competitor and further along commercially. They validate the category. The difference is sensing depth: wireless sensors and a thermostat produce an early warning. Twenty-seven hardwired mechanical parameters produce a probable cause. CoolAutomation reads the error codes equipment has already declared, which is a different problem. The real threat is the manufacturers, who are building direct-to-homeowner monitoring apps that watch the comfort result and route around the contractor who installed the equipment. That is exactly why contractors want an independent device.
The biggest competitor is the status quo
SmartAC.com is ahead of Corus commercially and validates the category. The difference is sensing depth, and depth is what turns a fault into a part number.
The gap widens rather than closing
A me-too product can copy the hardware. It cannot copy the operators already signed, and it cannot copy years of live baselines on the very systems it would be monitoring.
The longer we run, the harder we are to catch
Two advantages that deepen from the first day: the contractor we win will not run a second platform, and every unit accumulates a history no late entrant can buy.
A monitoring platform is the system a contractor runs his business on, not a brand he stocks. He will not run two. The switching cost is operational disruption across his whole service book, not $20.
Everyone starts at nameplate. Each Vigil then learns its own unit’s real behavior, and drift measured against real history beats drift measured against a generic spec.
Retention runs deeper than the technical defense. Private equity is consolidating HVAC service businesses, and buyers pay a premium for contracted recurring revenue over one-off calls. Every monitored unit on a service plan raises what the contractor’s own business is worth. Contractors do not cancel the thing inflating their multiple.
Sign the operator, and the whole service book follows
A single operator, from a multi-truck shop to a national facilities provider, manages anywhere from dozens to thousands of systems under contract. Winning one is not a unit sale. It is an account that keeps adding subscriptions with every service unit and every new install.
We do not sell units. We sign operators.
A single operator manages dozens to thousands of systems. Win the operator once and the whole service book follows, plus every new install after it.
Focused outreach to large-footprint HVAC and facilities operators. A list, not a spray.
Hands-on deployments prove the device in the field and open the pre-sales conversation.
A letter of intent for 25 units waives the onboarding fee.
Every service unit and every new install adds subscriptions inside the same account.
This round feeds that cycle directly. Pre-sale customers are invited into the community round as investor-customers. A customer who also owns equity refers harder than one who only subscribes.
Four contractors have committed to pilots
Corus planned three to five pilot sites. Four contractors committed, which puts the program at the top of that range. The second came as a referral from the first. That is the earliest evidence that contractor-to-contractor referral works inside this network.
Four committed contractors, on purpose
Three to five pilots were planned. Four are committed. They are field proof and the door into the pre-sales conversation, not the revenue engine.
First committed customer. Bundling roof and HVAC monitoring into a single service product of its own.
Home-market site, and the fastest feedback loop while the analytics are hand-run.
Came in as a referral from the first pilot. A construction company building a recurring service book.
Sells fixed-fee HVAC coverage to commercial real estate and absorbs the repair cost, so a failure predicted is a claim that never happens.
Three Kansas sites give the team hands-on access. The Atlanta site is the first proof the device works in a humid climate where latent load dominates.
The Atlanta site is the one an investor should look at twice. It is not a conventional service contractor: it sells fixed-fee HVAC coverage to commercial real estate and absorbs the repair and replacement cost itself. For that business, monitoring is actuarial rather than operational. A compressor caught in March is not a rescheduled truck roll, it is a claim that never happens.
Who is building it
Todd Gentry holds degrees in electrical engineering and marketing from Kansas State. The person specifying the sensor array is the same person writing the positioning. This is his third company. The first was acquired in 1997 and took him from co-founder to running a division of the public acquirer. The second sold consumer products into Walmart, Sam’s Club, Kroger, Ace, True Value, and Menards before he sold its core product line in 2013.
A founder who has done this twice
A pre-revenue hardware company is underwritten on its people and on who it chose to build with.
Third venture. Sold Horizon Internet Technologies to OneMain.com in 1997 and the core product line of Inno-Labs to Smith's Products in 2013. Dual degrees in electrical engineering and marketing.
20+ years in operations. Kerry, Golden State Foods.
20+ years. Georgia Pacific. Leads Up to 11 Marketing, the firm that ran the contractor research.
20+ years. General Electric. Innovative Sales Advisors.
Outside firms build the hardware and software under work-for-hire contracts. Corus owns every design and all intellectual property. Manufacturing sits within 20 miles of Wichita by choice. That is why the supply chain carries no tariff exposure, and why confirmed single-shift capacity is about 20,000 units a month.
Where the company actually is
Corus is pre-revenue. The hardware is real and captures all 27 parameters today. The automated layer on top of it, drift-versus-baseline detection and fault-to-part-number dispatch, is designed and funded by this round. It is not live yet. That is why the pilots are reviewed by hand while the software is built. Churn is unknown. Quantifying it is one of the jobs the pilots are there to do.
The hardware is built. This round builds the software.
The first angel round funded the device and the contractor research. The community round funds the analytics and dispatch stack.
Physical devices, real sensors, built in Wichita.
Funds the analytics and dispatch stack that sits on top of the hardware.
Pilots move off hand review and onto the stack.
A $2M institutionally-led growth round opens alongside it and prices the company.
If the round comes in light, the software ships as a functional MVP rather than the launch slipping.
98 million machines are running blind. We are building the layer that watches them.
The hardware is built and in the field. This round builds the intelligence on top of it, and puts it in the contractor’s hands rather than the manufacturer’s.
The machines that cool the world run blind. Corus is building the missing data layer for vapor-compression cooling, and putting it in the hands of the contractors who maintain that equipment rather than the manufacturers who sold it. If that is a layer you want to own a piece of, this is the round to do it in.