Hero slot — Wefunder places the founder video (1:1) here
Air conditioners break down. Nobody sees it coming.
Corus built a small device called the Vigil that watches air conditioning and heating systems around the clock. It tracks 27 different measurements and sends alerts to the company that services the equipment — not after something breaks, but weeks or months before it happens. The repair company can fix the problem on a Tuesday morning in April instead of scrambling on a Saturday night in July.
Highlights
- ✓98 million air conditioning systems in the U.S. About 22.5 million have a service plan. None are being watched between repair visits
- ✓A slow refrigerant leak caught early is a few hundred dollars of planned work. Left alone, it can wreck the compressor — and on an older system that usually means a whole new one, at about $7,500 on average
- ✓27 measurements tracked around the clock, reported to the repair company or building manager — not the equipment manufacturer
- ✓Four companies have signed up for pilots. Ten paid units go onto commercial rooftops in early October — three companies in Kansas, one in Atlanta
- ✓$99 setup fee covers most of the hardware cost. $240 per unit per year in subscription revenue. Built entirely in the U.S.
- ✓Third company for the founder. Sold the first in 1997, sold the second's main product line in 2013
What happens between repair visits
Most air conditioning systems get checked twice a year — once in the spring, once in the fall. A technician shows up, looks at the equipment, changes a filter, and leaves. That is two days of attention out of the whole year. The other 363 days, nobody is watching.
Problems build up slowly. Refrigerant leaks a little at a time. Motors start to wear down. A small electrical part gets weaker over months. None of that is obvious during a quick check-up. It shows up on the hottest day of the summer as an emergency — exactly when every repair company is already booked solid.
Vince Trotta, who runs sales for Corus, spent two nights in a hotel with his wife and an unimpressed cat during a summer heat wave. Their air conditioner quit and the house got too hot to stay in. The cause was a start capacitor — a part that costs about $45. It had been getting weaker for weeks, and nobody was watching. The repair company couldn’t come because every truck was already out. The Vigil is built to catch exactly that.
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.
A $45 part. Two nights in a hotel.
A problem everyone feels but nobody has solved
Emergency repair calls are how most HVAC companies meet new customers. But emergency work is terrible business. It shows up during heat waves when every truck is already out. It disappears in the spring and fall when the company has nothing to do.
Every single customer interview described the same desire: less reactive, more stable and predictable income throughout the year. About 22.5 million of the 98 million systems in the country have a service plan — roughly one in four. The companies know steady plan revenue is the answer. They have never had a new reason to offer a customer.
It is not just repair companies feeling the pain. Property management companies — the ones running office buildings, medical centers, and vacation rentals — take the blame when the air conditioning goes out. A hot conference room. A production line that shuts down. A walk-in cooler that loses everything inside it. Their whole job is making sure buildings run smoothly. When something breaks, it looks like they failed, and their customers start looking for a replacement.
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.
How the Vigil works
The Vigil is a small box that connects to an air conditioning or heat pump system. A technician installs it in about 30 minutes without cutting into any sealed parts. The manufacturer’s warranty stays valid — which is the biggest concern most repair companies have.
It watches 27 different measurements across five areas: the refrigerant system, the electrical system, the air temperature and humidity, motor vibrations, and safety alarms. It learns how each specific unit actually runs, instead of just comparing it to the factory numbers on its label.
A slow leak. A dirty coil. The first signs of a compressor wearing out. All of it shows up months before the system fails, when it can be fixed on a regular work day instead of an emergency.
There is no screen on the device. Everything goes straight to the internet, and the repair company sees it on a computer or a phone. Every unit shows as green, yellow, or red. Red means something urgent, and it sends a notification right away. Yellow means a unit needs attention soon — a reminder to schedule a visit before the problem gets worse. This software is running today in an early beta version, and it gets better every week.
Corus is also working toward sending alerts straight into ServiceTitan, a program many HVAC shops already use to run their day. That connection is planned but not built yet — Corus has started the process of applying to their marketplace.
Product photo — the Vigil installed on a rooftop unit
Fleet dashboard — green / yellow / red
Unit detail — alert view
Unit detail — 27 parameters
27 parameters, five domains, continuously
24 hardwired board inputs map to 27 monitored parameters, because three combination sensors capture both temperature and humidity.
Why so many measurements matter
One pressure reading can tell you something is wrong. But add in temperature, electrical current, and outdoor conditions, and now you can tell the repair company exactly what the problem is before the truck even leaves the shop. That is the difference between fixing it in one trip instead of 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.
The Vigil runs the complicated math automatically. Most technicians skip it when they are in a hurry. A basic sensor can tell you a building is not cooling. It cannot tell you whether the filter is clogged or the refrigerant is low. Getting that wrong means the wrong part ends up on the truck, and the technician has to come back a second time.
Nobody replaces a system because of a leak. They replace it because the leak was never found.
The compressor is the heart of the system. The refrigerant flowing through it keeps it cool and carries its oil back to it. When a slow leak drops the refrigerant level, the compressor starts running hot and short on oil. It can take months to fail. By the time the building stops cooling, the damage is done, and a repair has turned into a replacement.
The other three in four have nobody watching and no agreement in place.
How the money works
The HVAC repair company is the customer. They pay $99 per system when the Vigil is installed, then $20 per month after that, with a one-year minimum. The repair company never buys the device — Corus owns it for the life of the subscription. The building owner does not deal with Corus at all. The repair company just adds monitoring to the service plan they already sell.
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 why adoption should be straightforward. Corus is not asking anyone to have a new conversation with their customers. The service plan already exists. The Vigil adds one line to it.
The hardware pays for itself quickly
The usual worry with a hardware company is that every new customer costs money up front. The $99 setup fee solves most of that. A Vigil costs about $120 to build. The setup fee covers roughly 80 percent on installation day, leaving about $21 to recover — roughly one month of the $20 subscription. Against $240 per year of recurring revenue, it looks like a setup fee plus a subscription, not a hardware business.
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 setup fee can be adjusted. Waive it to land a 25-unit deal. Cut it for a limited-time promotion. The $20 monthly price never changes. That is the number that determines the company’s value, so it is the one number that stays fixed.
The customers are already out there
There are roughly 98 million air conditioning and heat pump systems in the United States, serviced by about 117,000 HVAC companies. In any town of 5,000 people or more, there are about 25 repair companies with almost nothing to tell them apart. Around 22.5 million of those systems already have a service plan — that is the market the Vigil is priced for.
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.
Corus sells to whoever holds the service contract. Right now that means companies with a lot of systems to look after: contractors with big service books, building managers, and companies that cover repair costs themselves. The Vigil works on any air conditioning or heat pump system. Corus starts where the systems are grouped together, because winning one company brings hundreds of systems with it.
Four things changed at once
New government rules, expensive refrigerant, a shortage of technicians, and a wave of companies buying up HVAC businesses all happened at the same time. The Vigil helps with all four: it detects leaks of new flammable refrigerant, it saves labor by reducing emergency calls, and it creates the kind of steady subscription income that makes a repair business worth more when it is time to sell.
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.
What Corus is up against
The biggest competitor is not another company. It is the way things have always been done: two visits a year, paper records, and waiting for things to break. That approach costs nothing to keep using and has enormous momentum. Showing people the 363-day blind spot is most of the sales job.
SmartAC.com is the closest direct competitor and further along commercially. That is actually good news — it proves the market exists. The difference is depth. Wireless sensors and a thermostat give you an early warning. Twenty-seven hardwired measurements give you a specific diagnosis. CoolAutomation reads the error messages a system has already produced, which is a different problem.
The real long-term threat comes from manufacturers building monitoring apps that go directly to homeowners and cut out the repair company. That is exactly why repair companies want an independent device they control.
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.
Why a copycat can’t just show up
Someone could build similar hardware. They cannot copy the repair companies already using the Vigil, and they cannot copy years of performance data on the exact systems those companies service.
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.
There is a deeper lock-in. Private equity firms are buying up HVAC service businesses, and they pay more for businesses with steady subscription income than for businesses that live on one-time emergency calls. Every unit monitored by the Vigil makes the repair company’s business worth more when they sell. They are not going to cancel the thing that is raising their price tag.
How Corus finds customers
One repair company or facilities operator manages dozens to thousands of systems. Winning one is not a single sale — it is an account that keeps growing with every new service contract and every new installation.
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.
Two types of customers reach the same market. HVAC repair companies watch the equipment they service. Property management companies watch the equipment they are responsible for. Both pay the same price, and a repair company already using the Vigil becomes the natural partner for a building manager who signs up.
This round feeds that cycle directly. Pilot customers are invited to invest in the community round. A customer who also owns a piece of the company refers harder than one who only subscribes.
The first customers are already on board
Four companies have signed up, and the first ten paid units go onto commercial rooftops in early October. Some are HVAC repair companies. Some look after buildings for their customers. One came as a referral from another, which is the first sign that word gets around.
Four operators. Ten paid deployments.
Four operators are committed, with ten paid deployments between them, all on commercial rooftop units. 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.
Every pilot goes on a commercial rooftop unit. A rooftop unit keeps the whole system in one box, so one Vigil can watch all of it. Corus is building the pilot units by hand right now, so it starts where each one does the most work.
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 deserves a closer look. It is not a typical repair company. It sells all-inclusive HVAC coverage to commercial buildings and absorbs the repair costs itself. For them, monitoring is not about scheduling better — it is about catching expensive problems before they happen. A compressor spotted in March is a claim that never gets filed.
The people behind it
Todd Gentry has degrees in electrical engineering and marketing from Kansas State. The same person designing the sensor system is the one writing the business plan. This is his third company. The first was bought in 1997 and led to him running a division of the buyer. The second sold products into Walmart, Sam’s Club, Kroger, Ace, True Value, and Menards before he sold its main 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 companies build the hardware and software under work-for-hire contracts. Corus owns every design and all the intellectual property. Manufacturing sits within 20 miles of Wichita on purpose. That is why the supply chain has zero tariff risk, and why confirmed production capacity is about 20,000 units per month.
Where things stand right now
Corus is early revenue — the first ten paid units deploy in October. The hardware is real and already tracks all 27 measurements. The software is running too, in an early beta version: the dashboard, the green-yellow-red status for each unit, and the alerts. The Corus team will also check the pilot data by hand while the software proves itself. Two things are not built yet: matching a problem to the exact part a technician needs, and connecting to programs like ServiceTitan. Customer retention rates are unknown — measuring them is one of the reasons the pilots exist.
This round pays for three things: professional software engineers to take the beta to a finished product — tighter security, more reliability, and the groundwork to connect with programs like ServiceTitan — plus a production mold for the device’s case and a custom circuit board to replace the prototype hardware. A follow-up investment round of about $2 million is planned after this one. That round will set the company’s official value, fund the sales team, and convert the SAFE notes from this round into actual ownership shares.
Hardware built. Beta software running. This round takes both to production.
The first angel round funded the device and the contractor research, and the beta software was built in-house. The community round takes that software to production and pays for the production mold and the purpose-built circuit board.
Physical devices, real sensors, built in Wichita. Dashboard, unit status, and alerts running in beta.
Funds production software engineering, the production injection mold, and a purpose-built circuit board.
Ten hand-built Vigils across four operators, all on commercial rooftop units, running on the beta software with the team checking the data by hand.
Professional engineering for security and reliability. Pilots move off hand review. Groundwork laid for integrations like ServiceTitan.
A ~$2M venture-led growth round opens alongside it and prices the SAFEs into equity.
If the round comes in light, the beta software is already running — launch goes ahead on a leaner version rather than slipping.
The device doesn’t care what kind of building it’s in. The sales sequence starts where the density is.
98 million machines are running blind. We are building the layer that watches them.
The hardware is built, the beta software is running, and the first units go onto customer rooftops in early October. This round turns that beta into a production system, and keeps it in the contractor’s hands rather than the manufacturer’s.
Invest nowThe machines that cool the world are running blind. Corus is building the missing information layer for air conditioning, and putting it in the hands of the people who fix the equipment, not the companies that made it. If that is something you want to own a piece of, this is the round to do it.