2025 Startups to Watch: Icorium matches a complex environmental threat with Kansas-powered innovation

Editor’s note: Startland News editors selected 10 Kansas City scaling businesses to spotlight for its annual Startups to Watch list. Now in its 10th year, this feature recognizes founders and startups that editors believe will make some of the biggest, most compelling news in the coming 12 months. The following is one of 2025’s companies.

Click here to view the full list of Startups to Watch — presented by Morgan Stanley, and independently produced by Startland News — and see how the companies (including this one) were selected.

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Technology to give dangerous refrigerants a recycled purpose at their end of life is heating up, said Kalin Baca, whose climate tech startup is working to keep waste out of the environment.

Icorium Engineering — a spin-out of the University of Kansas’ Wonderful Institute for Sustainable Engineering (WISE-KU) located at KU Innovation Park in Lawrence — is focused on recycling refrigerant mixtures, she continued, which are critical materials but also potent greenhouse gases.

“The reality is that all the refrigerants that we use today — or at least, most of them — are complex mixtures,” Baca explained. “And when they get to the end of life, there’s no technology that’s able to completely separate them back into their component parts because they form a type of mixture that isn’t able to be separated using just temperature, which is what most commercial separation metals rely on.”

But Icorium’s innovative separation technology recycles and repurposes refrigerants through extractive distillation, Baca said, which reduces waste of critical materials, lowers greenhouse gas emissions, and helps industries meet requirements of environmental regulations.

“Our technology comes in and is able to take all these complex mixtures — whether there are two components or even up to a seven-plus component mixture — and break them back into their pure component parts,” she continued. “That lets them be reused, repurposed, and recycled as refrigerants again or they can also be used as chemical feedstocks.”

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• Elevator pitch: Icorium’s innovative separation technology recycles and repurposes refrigerants through extractive distillation.
• Founders: Kalin Baca and Mark Shiflett
• Headquarters location: Lawrence, Kansas
• Founding year: 2022
• Current employee count: 8
• Funding amount raised to date: $1.05M 
• Noteworthy programs/accelerators/incubators completed: NSF I-Corps, Rice Business Plan Competition, Pure Pitch Rally

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In the past year, Icorium has grown its team to eight employees, joined competitors in the Pure Pitch Rally, and earned more than $180,000 in prizes in the prestigious Rice Business Plan Competition.

“2024 has been a huge growth year,” Baca noted. “Just getting word out there about Icorium and the technology has been huge.”

Kalin Baca, Icorium Engineering Company, pitches her startup at the 2024 Pure Pitch Rally; photo by Taylor Wilmore, Startland News

ICYMI: KU spinout earns $180K+ in prizes at business plan competition; students going full-time with startup

The startup also finished up phase one of a small business grant with the National Science Foundation, which Baca said proved that their technology works. Plus the team has raised $1 million of its $1.5 million seed round.

“That’s been incredible,” she added. “We’re working on key partnerships, and we should hear on our phase two of the National Science Foundation grant by hopefully February.”

In 2025, the Icorium team hopes to go from the startup’s current pilot scale to actually starting designs and site selection for a commercial demonstration plant. Baca and co-founder Mark Shiflett are actively looking at sites in Kansas, as well as co-locations with key partners. They hope to have a site selected in the first quarter of 2025, so the plant can be fully operational in 2026.

“That would allow us to process a million pounds a year of refrigerant mixtures at the baseline and we might be able to do a little bit more,” Baca explained. “Right now, we’ve proven out the technology, but we’re at the KU campus, so we can’t run that like a commercial column.” 

“So having a plant site will allow us to have that continuous operation, show the technology out, and also prove out all the logistics of moving around the refrigerant across the scenes,” she added. “It’s a lot of pieces coming together, but then also having a real product that can be sold within the market.”

After the demonstration plant is completed, the team has plans to build a larger, industrial-scale plant, hopefully by the end of 2028, noted Shiflett, a Foundation Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at KU and the director WISE-KU.

“That would make Icorium the largest refrigerant recycler in the world,” he said.

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• Hilltop Technologies targets cybersecurity for Main Street (with help from next-gen talent)
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