LAVA's EIC Accelerator Bets on a New Thermodynamic Cycle

In every conventional heat engine the working gas cools as it expands, and once it has cooled enough, the expansion and the work stop. LAVA, an Israeli company founded in 2020 and trading earlier as Luminescent Solar Power, says it has built a cycle in which the gas stays at a constant temperature while it expands, using a liquid-based design. Its founders describe the ambition as building "a hydro turbine with heat", after the roughly 90% efficiency of hydro turbines, and point out that the thermodynamic cycle they are trying to replace is about 130 years old.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, Lava Heat Engine, at its October 2024 cut-off for blended finance under the renewable energy challenge, and CORDIS records a grant of €2,499,999 from July 2025 to June 2027 to turn industrial and geothermal heat into electricity. The CORDIS page carries no performance figures at all, and no independent measurement of the cycle has been published.

A solar developer and a Technion physicist

CEO Doron Tamir spent a decade building one of Israel's larger solar development companies, with more than 300MW developed and connected, and CTO Carmel Rotschild is an associate professor at the Technion whose idea the cycle is. Lior Handelsman, co-founder of SolarEdge and a partner at Grove Ventures, was the first investor and is now chairman, and VP engineering Erez Klein came from 24 years at the geothermal company Ormat.

In December 2022 the company, then called Luminescent, raised a $7 million all-equity seed round led by Grove Ventures with Extantia Capital, Axios reported, for an engine meant to work on any heat source between 100°C and 550°C. In March 2024 the Canadian NGIF accelerator granted $370,000 toward a 200kW engine.

The claims, and who makes them

LAVA's website is specific: 70 to 80% of Carnot efficiency across a wide temperature range, 20 to 30% conversion of industrial waste heat into electricity, a 20 to 30% increase in geothermal generation capacity, 25% higher efficiency at one third of the cost, payback in one to three years, and for the heat pump, operation up to 200°C with lifts of up to 200°C and a 35% higher coefficient of performance for data centre water cooling. Presale was announced to start in 2025.

None of these figures appears in the CORDIS record, which notes only the proprietary liquid-based isothermal technology. The project title calls it "the world's most efficient heat engine"; the fact sheet substantiates nothing of the kind. No pilot installation, customer or third-party test result has been published, and the company's own interviews name no deployment.

1. A working isothermal cycleDescribedPublicly explained in 2026; no published measurement.
2. 70 to 80% of Carnot efficiencyCompany claimNot in CORDIS, not independently tested.
3. Industrial or geothermal pilotNone publicNo site or partner utility named.
4. SalesNot reportedPresale announced for 2025; no order disclosed.

Small disclosed funding for a large claim

The publicly announced money is modest for a company of more than 50 people building power hardware: a $7 million seed, a $370,000 Canadian grant and the €2.5 million EIC grant. The EIC award was blended finance, and no EIC Fund investment has been announced. Aggregator databases put the total raised far higher, but no further round has been announced by the company or its investors, and its accounts are not public.

The commercial model offered on the website is two-sided: electricity as a service with no upfront cost, or direct purchase. Production is planned through a German automotive partner, because, as Tamir puts it, Israel lacks the capabilities for mass manufacturing, with a US replication planned later.

Why Europe is the market

The company's target markets are European as much as American: district heating networks measured in tens of gigawatts, data centres that need cooling and storage, and geothermal plants. Its manufacturing is to be German. The EIC's challenge on renewable energy and its whole value chain is a reasonable fit, and an engine that squeezes more electricity out of existing steam and geothermal plants would matter for European industrial decarbonisation without requiring new heat sources.