Technology Climate change

 30 UK tech scaleups tackling climate change

Tech Nation’s Net Zero programme is supporting 30 British scaleups working to solve climate change issues with innovations in construction, farming, robotics, and e-mobility.

The UK has the highest number of net zero companies in Europe, at 323 compared to 207 in France and 150 in Germany, according to Tech Nation’s new report, titled ‘Net zero report: mapping global sustainable tech pioneers’.


Tech Nation has selected 30 of these companies to join its Net Zero programme, designed to support innovative companies helping to build a more sustainable future. The companies – all in the scaleup stage – represent a range of sectors including construction, agriculture, and energy. They are addressing climate change issues with innovations in electric mobility, farming, measuring environmental footprints, and improving manufacturing and recycling supply chains.


According to Tech Nation, these companies represent the most promising scaleups contributing to the UK reaching its goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.


“The UK's net zero sector is home to 323 tech companies that are working hard to reduce carbon emissions globally,” said Tech Nation CEO Gerard Grech. “Scaling such businesses can be hard, which is why we are delighted to launch a new programme focused on businesses at this stage of growth from all over the UK, especially given the impact they will have on climate change and their drive towards a net zero economy.”


The government-backed Net Zero initiative aims to accelerate the growth of the UK’s most promising net zero scaleups by helping them to quantify stainability, navigate the regulatory landscape, and expand internationally.


Net Zero programme lead Zheela Qaiser added: “All 149 applications we received for the Net Zero programme were excellent, showcasing the richness of solutions that small teams of innovators are working on to help us make monumental changes to the way our human world and systems impact our planet.”


Here we take a look at the 30 companies selected for the programme.

Click to read more

Sustainable buildings 

Airex, London

Airex has a mission to end fuel poverty. Aiming to reduce home energy consumption, Airex is an IoT-enabled smart ventilation control that helps reduce heat demand in homes, whilst managing indoor air quality. The system's in-built smart sensors monitor and analyse environmental conditions, while its cloud-based algorithms automatically regulate air flow. Airex is approved by UK energy regulator Ofgem to be adopted under the Energy Company Obligation scheme.

Pivot Energy, Poole

Pivot has created a living building energy model designed to attract more development for eco-friendly houses in the UK’s social housing sector. The platform uses machine learning and AI to generate an energy efficiency projection that is 90% or more accurate. Once a project is designed, Pivot’s industry-leading performance insurance guarantees the results, de-risking investment decisions.

Sero, Cardiff

Changing the focus of the housing industry to decarbonisation, Sero supports housing providers and their residents to reach net zero by sitting at the intersection of home comfort, construction and energy. Sero develops homes that complement changing energy systems using its energy platform, expertise, optimised design, construction and the new commissioning process of new and existing homes. This saves residents money, effort and it’s more planet-friendly.

Wondrwall, Manchester

Creating intelligent homes for a sustainable future, Wondrwall is a technology company dedicated to changing the way we live and how we use energy. Combining intelligent, AI-powered home automation with clean energy production and super-efficient heating systems, Wondrwall helps the world's homes save money, time and the environment.

Electric vehicle ecosystem 

Antonym, Leeds

The road freight market is worth £2.5 trillion, but it's a big culprit when it comes to carbon emissions. Antonym is tackling the issue with smarter, safer, cleaner and greener logistics. Using proprietary in-house EV technology and advanced manufacturing techniques like metal 3D printing, Antonym offers a bolt-in plug and play solution to electrify existing diesel trucks to make them electric, zero-emissions, and noiseless.

Connected Kerb, London

Moving to electric vehicles en masse is impossible without the corresponding infrastructure. Connect Kerb’s EV charging and smart cities infrastructure champions sustainability, connectivity and flexibility. Connected Kerb is developing an entirely new, environmentally sensitive combined infrastructure that has the potential to enable everyone to transition to electric vehicles, while providing an interoperable platform for current and future technologies.

Elmo, London

Elmo is a carbon-neutral electric car subscription service providing flexible and affordable EV 'usership'. The platform offers fully integrated, personal e-mobility with insurance, maintenance, breakdown, road tax and a carbon offset donation included as standard. On top of this, Elmo is the world’s first mobility-as-a-service platform to include a home charge point, discounted renewable energy and public charging access - all wrapped into a single monthly bill.

Ember Core, Edinburgh

Ember is the world's first 100% electric intercity bus operator and is building its own ultra rapid charging network. Ember's mission is to make a zero-carbon, zero-traffic world a reality. Its tech-led approach delivers an integrated platform for managing vehicles, chargers, routes and drivers - allowing them to operate EVs at a higher utilisation. Ember’s technology improves the passenger experience, supporting a modal shift away from cars and improving social inclusion.

Enso Tyres, London

Tyres are the automotive industry’s big dirty secret, contributing enormously to carbon emissions, air pollution and microplastic pollution. Despite electric vehicles accelerating towards a carbon-neutral future, tyres have thus far been neglected. EVs are heavier and have higher torque, wearing tyres faster and creating more harmful tyre pollution than normal cars. Enso addresses this problem by developing more efficient, durable and sustainable tyres for EVs.

Petalite, Birmingham

Petalite wants to reinvent the electric vehicle industry by creating a charging technology that’s cost-efficient and more reliable. Its patented SDC charging technology lowers charger costs, increases reliability and lengthens lifetime - all whilst keeping similar efficiency to existing competition. Petalite’s goal is to be a key player in the adoption of electric vehicles over the next five years.

Spark EV Technology, Cambridge

Spark EV Technology develops and supplies personalised journey prediction and map display software for electric vehicles of all sizes. By combining data such as vehicle size, driver experience, weather predictions with machine learning algorithms, it significantly improves journey prediction accuracy compared to existing vehicle systems. The company's goal is to accelerate EV adoption by providing automotive customers a trusted onboard system.

Energy and electricity

Surple, Newport

Surple helps businesses make smarter energy decisions through their energy management software. It pulls data from buildings into its cloud-based software, which runs analytics to provide actionable insights to users, helping them to reduce energy use, carbon emissions and ultimately their costs. Businesses in the UK have an opportunity to collectively save £6bn through energy efficiency and Surple is making this process easier to manage.

Tepeo, Maidenhead

Tepeo tackles the UK’s biggest challenge to achieving its net zero target: rapid and low-cost decarbonisation of domestic heating. Its product combines electric resistive heating with ultra-high density dry core thermal storage (40kWh) to deliver the performance of a fossil fuel boiler without the associated emissions. In parallel, the enormous amount of flexibility it provides supports self-consumption of renewables and supports balancing of the electricity grid.

Zeigo, London

Zeigo uses machine learning to reduce the complexity surrounding renewable energy procurement, making it easier for corporations, renewable energy developers and suppliers to switch to, or offer, renewable energy solutions. It’s a one-stop-shop for stakeholders to transition to clean energy through power purchase agreements and short-term contracts. Zeigo uses data insights to increase market transparency.

Naked Energy, London

Naked Energy is redefining solar energy solutions and tackling the global challenge of decarbonising heating and cooling. Its product, Virtu, is 44% more efficient than existing solutions and takes up 40% less space. Virtu combines solar heat and power, saves the customer money and saves the planet - all within a single elegant product that is easy to install and maintain.

Hark, Leeds

How businesses and big buildings consume energy needs to change if we’re going to hit net zero in 2050. Hark is tackling this issue by helping enterprises increase efficiency, maximise yield and reduce waste. Hark provides energy analytics and industrial IoT for enterprises, allowing energy managers and asset operators to easily connect to, monitor and control their buildings, energy meters and industrial process assets.

Boxergy, Edinburgh

The best way to drive adoption of clean energy is to lower the cost. Boxergy’s mission is to provide home energy cheaper, greener and smarter by selling it, and the hardware required, as a service. Its Hero platform brings together existing low carbon technologies to maximize efficiency and integrates them with its smart tariff. This allows customers to buy energy when it's cheap and green, and use it when they want.

Electron, London

Current top-down energy management tools are unable to accommodate increasing renewable energy generation or distributed energy assets on the grid, resulting in costlier grid constraints and missed opportunities for consumers to use zero carbon power. Electron is creating a next generation market platform for low-carbon electricity systems and networks. It enables multiple market operators to interact with thousands of distributed energy resources and create incentives to use renewable generation and network capacity more efficiently.

Waste management and circularity 

CupClub, London

CupClub is a platform for brands and retailers to manage and track consumer reusable packaging for the food and beverage industry. On a mission to reduce single-use plastics from circulation, CupClub enables customers to halve CO2 consumption by switching to reusable packaging. CupClub manages its end-to-end reuse system by charging customers a flat per order fee to collect, sanitise and redistribute their packaging.

Lixea, London

Tackling the issue of unsustainable materials, Lixea’s BioFlex process takes any type of woody biomass that normally would be unrecyclable and separates the components to make them usable by converting them to products such as high-quality fine and bulk chemicals, bioplastics, renewable fibres and biofuels once again. It does this by using low-cost, environmentally friendly solvents, called liquid salts or ionic liquids.

Reath, Edinburgh

The true extent of the environmental and climatic impact of our throwaway culture is becoming worryingly clear. Reath enables businesses to break the pattern and transition away from single-use, by applying track and trace technology to solve the data problems inherent in reuse models. It is currently developing the world's first global open data standard for reusable packaging.

Topolytics, Edinburgh

Topolytics analyses waste at scale and generates invaluable insights for the recycling industry and waste management sector, preventing more materials from ending up in landfills or seeping out into nature. By using data science, it makes the world’s waste visible, verifiable and valuable. Analysing data on commercial, industrial and post-consumer waste from multiple sources and systems, it uses machine learning and mapping to make sense of this complex combination of materials.

Agriculture and food systems 

Better Dairy, London

Dairy farming emits over 1.7 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year, more than five times as much as the global aviation industry. Better Dairy is developing completely animal-free dairy products that are molecularly identical to traditional dairy, using a similar process to beer brewing. Removing animals from dairy production isn’t only great for animals and the environment, but gives consumers better food options and manufacturers better ingredients.

LettUs Grow, Bristol

LettUs Grow design the farms of the future. Its aeroponic farming technology and farm management software for indoor and vertical farms delivers higher crop yields, reduces the environmental impact of agriculture and makes farmers’ lives easier. The products also enable people to grow produce nearer to the point of consumption, which reduces the carbon footprint left by fresh produce.

Small Robot Company, Salisbury

Small Robot Company is reimagining farming to make food production sustainable. By using robotics and artificial intelligence to maximise the yield from crops, it offers a brand new model for sustainable, efficient and profitable farming called Per Plant Farming. Its farmbots farm each plant individually. This increases yields, soil quality, biodiversity, and reduces carbon emissions and chemicals by up to 90%.

Environmental footprinting 

Earthly, London

Earthly is a tech platform giving businesses a new way to lead the fight against climate change. Focused on natural carbon removal, Earthly helps businesses invest in natural climate solutions that take them beyond carbon-neutrality to become climate-positive. Investments support projects that protect, restore and re-establish crucial ecosystems like forests, peatlands, mangroves and seabeds. Each project is vetted by an independent scientific board, monitored by satellite, and visualised on a shareable immersive platform.

Giki Social Enterprise, London

The average UK carbon footprint is 9 tonnes per person per year. To help people live more sustainably, Giki’s mobile app enables people to find more sustainable and healthy products in UK supermarkets. Giki Zero is an interactive, step-by-step guide to a sustainable life, which helps people to understand, track and reduce their environmental footprint, drive change through their own actions and set their own personal path towards net zero.

 Smart cities

Route Konnect, Cardiff

Route Konnect makes traffic more predictable and more eco-friendly by making smarter junctions and predicting the amount of vehicles and people. By using real-time automated insights from its combined camera and LiDAR traffic sensors, it produces a dashboard giving users the ability to see the road network at any time during the day, enabling people to make smarter choices that avoid traffic jams, unnecessary pollution and burning of fossil fuels.

Supply chain

Circulor, London

Manufacturing and recycling supply chains are complex, global and often involve dealing with human rights or environmental issues. Circulor empowers businesses to fully manage their supply chains and drive responsible sourcing and recycling. Circulor creates an immutable record of the chain of custody of materials, linking the end products to their source. This traceability data also enables organisations to make informed decisions to reduce their carbon footprint.

Offsetting

Ecologi, Bristol

Ecologi (formerly Offset Earth) is a subscription service for carbon consumption, kind of like Netflix for the planet. With the overarching aim to avoid two thirds of all carbon emissions, individuals and businesses can remove their carbon footprints by subscribing to grow their own forests or contribute to other carbon reducing activities. Customers have complete transparency to where their money goes each month, and can set themselves personalised eco goals.

Sustainable buildings 

Airex, London

Airex has a mission to end fuel poverty. Aiming to reduce home energy consumption, Airex is an IoT-enabled smart ventilation control that helps reduce heat demand in homes, whilst managing indoor air quality. The system's in-built smart sensors monitor and analyse environmental conditions, while its cloud-based algorithms automatically regulate air flow. Airex is approved by UK energy regulator Ofgem to be adopted under the Energy Company Obligation scheme.

Pivot Energy, Poole

Pivot has created a living building energy model designed to attract more development for eco-friendly houses in the UK’s social housing sector. The platform uses machine learning and AI to generate an energy efficiency projection that is 90% or more accurate. Once a project is designed, Pivot’s industry-leading performance insurance guarantees the results, de-risking investment decisions.

Sero, Cardiff

Changing the focus of the housing industry to decarbonisation, Sero supports housing providers and their residents to reach net zero by sitting at the intersection of home comfort, construction and energy. Sero develops homes that complement changing energy systems using its energy platform, expertise, optimised design, construction and the new commissioning process of new and existing homes. This saves residents money, effort and it’s more planet-friendly.

Wondrwall, Manchester

Creating intelligent homes for a sustainable future, Wondrwall is a technology company dedicated to changing the way we live and how we use energy. Combining intelligent, AI-powered home automation with clean energy production and super-efficient heating systems, Wondrwall helps the world's homes save money, time and the environment.

 Smart cities

Route Konnect, Cardiff

Route Konnect makes traffic more predictable and more eco-friendly by making smarter junctions and predicting the amount of vehicles and people. By using real-time automated insights from its combined camera and LiDAR traffic sensors, it produces a dashboard giving users the ability to see the road network at any time during the day, enabling people to make smarter choices that avoid traffic jams, unnecessary pollution and burning of fossil fuels.

Electric vehicle ecosystem 

Antonym, Leeds

The road freight market is worth £2.5 trillion, but it's a big culprit when it comes to carbon emissions. Antonym is tackling the issue with smarter, safer, cleaner and greener logistics. Using proprietary in-house EV technology and advanced manufacturing techniques like metal 3D printing, Antonym offers a bolt-in plug and play solution to electrify existing diesel trucks to make them electric, zero-emissions, and noiseless.

Connected Kerb, London

Moving to electric vehicles en masse is impossible without the corresponding infrastructure. Connect Kerb’s EV charging and smart cities infrastructure champions sustainability, connectivity and flexibility. Connected Kerb is developing an entirely new, environmentally sensitive combined infrastructure that has the potential to enable everyone to transition to electric vehicles, while providing an interoperable platform for current and future technologies.

Elmo, London

Elmo is a carbon-neutral electric car subscription service providing flexible and affordable EV 'usership'. The platform offers fully integrated, personal e-mobility with insurance, maintenance, breakdown, road tax and a carbon offset donation included as standard. On top of this, Elmo is the world’s first mobility-as-a-service platform to include a home charge point, discounted renewable energy and public charging access - all wrapped into a single monthly bill.

Ember Core, Edinburgh

Ember is the world's first 100% electric intercity bus operator and is building its own ultra rapid charging network. Ember's mission is to make a zero-carbon, zero-traffic world a reality. Its tech-led approach delivers an integrated platform for managing vehicles, chargers, routes and drivers - allowing them to operate EVs at a higher utilisation. Ember’s technology improves the passenger experience, supporting a modal shift away from cars and improving social inclusion.

Enso Tyres, London

Tyres are the automotive industry’s big dirty secret, contributing enormously to carbon emissions, air pollution and microplastic pollution. Despite electric vehicles accelerating towards a carbon-neutral future, tyres have thus far been neglected. EVs are heavier and have higher torque, wearing tyres faster and creating more harmful tyre pollution than normal cars. Enso addresses this problem by developing more efficient, durable and sustainable tyres for EVs.

Petalite, Birmingham

Petalite wants to reinvent the electric vehicle industry by creating a charging technology that’s cost-efficient and more reliable. Its patented SDC charging technology lowers charger costs, increases reliability and lengthens lifetime - all whilst keeping similar efficiency to existing competition. Petalite’s goal is to be a key player in the adoption of electric vehicles over the next five years.

Spark EV Technology, Cambridge

Spark EV Technology develops and supplies personalised journey prediction and map display software for electric vehicles of all sizes. By combining data such as vehicle size, driver experience, weather predictions with machine learning algorithms, it significantly improves journey prediction accuracy compared to existing vehicle systems. The company's goal is to accelerate EV adoption by providing automotive customers a trusted onboard system.

Energy and electricity

Surple, Newport

Surple helps businesses make smarter energy decisions through their energy management software. It pulls data from buildings into its cloud-based software, which runs analytics to provide actionable insights to users, helping them to reduce energy use, carbon emissions and ultimately their costs. Businesses in the UK have an opportunity to collectively save £6bn through energy efficiency and Surple is making this process easier to manage.

Tepeo, Maidenhead

Tepeo tackles the UK’s biggest challenge to achieving its net zero target: rapid and low-cost decarbonisation of domestic heating. Its product combines electric resistive heating with ultra-high density dry core thermal storage (40kWh) to deliver the performance of a fossil fuel boiler without the associated emissions. In parallel, the enormous amount of flexibility it provides supports self-consumption of renewables and supports balancing of the electricity grid.

Zeigo, London

Zeigo uses machine learning to reduce the complexity surrounding renewable energy procurement, making it easier for corporations, renewable energy developers and suppliers to switch to, or offer, renewable energy solutions. It’s a one-stop-shop for stakeholders to transition to clean energy through power purchase agreements and short-term contracts. Zeigo uses data insights to increase market transparency.

Naked Energy, London

Naked Energy is redefining solar energy solutions and tackling the global challenge of decarbonising heating and cooling. Its product, Virtu, is 44% more efficient than existing solutions and takes up 40% less space. Virtu combines solar heat and power, saves the customer money and saves the planet - all within a single elegant product that is easy to install and maintain.

Hark, Leeds

How businesses and big buildings consume energy needs to change if we’re going to hit net zero in 2050. Hark is tackling this issue by helping enterprises increase efficiency, maximise yield and reduce waste. Hark provides energy analytics and industrial IoT for enterprises, allowing energy managers and asset operators to easily connect to, monitor and control their buildings, energy meters and industrial process assets.

Boxergy, Edinburgh

The best way to drive adoption of clean energy is to lower the cost. Boxergy’s mission is to provide home energy cheaper, greener and smarter by selling it, and the hardware required, as a service. Its Hero platform brings together existing low carbon technologies to maximize efficiency and integrates them with its smart tariff. This allows customers to buy energy when it's cheap and green, and use it when they want.

Electron, London

Current top-down energy management tools are unable to accommodate increasing renewable energy generation or distributed energy assets on the grid, resulting in costlier grid constraints and missed opportunities for consumers to use zero carbon power. Electron is creating a next generation market platform for low-carbon electricity systems and networks. It enables multiple market operators to interact with thousands of distributed energy resources and create incentives to use renewable generation and network capacity more efficiently.

Agriculture and food systems 

Better Dairy, London

Dairy farming emits over 1.7 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year, more than five times as much as the global aviation industry. Better Dairy is developing completely animal-free dairy products that are molecularly identical to traditional dairy, using a similar process to beer brewing. Removing animals from dairy production isn’t only great for animals and the environment, but gives consumers better food options and manufacturers better ingredients.

LettUs Grow, Bristol

LettUs Grow design the farms of the future. Its aeroponic farming technology and farm management software for indoor and vertical farms delivers higher crop yields, reduces the environmental impact of agriculture and makes farmers’ lives easier. The products also enable people to grow produce nearer to the point of consumption, which reduces the carbon footprint left by fresh produce.

Small Robot Company, Salisbury

Small Robot Company is reimagining farming to make food production sustainable. By using robotics and artificial intelligence to maximise the yield from crops, it offers a brand new model for sustainable, efficient and profitable farming called Per Plant Farming. Its farmbots farm each plant individually. This increases yields, soil quality, biodiversity, and reduces carbon emissions and chemicals by up to 90%.

Waste management and circularity 

CupClub, London

CupClub is a platform for brands and retailers to manage and track consumer reusable packaging for the food and beverage industry. On a mission to reduce single-use plastics from circulation, CupClub enables customers to halve CO2 consumption by switching to reusable packaging. CupClub manages its end-to-end reuse system by charging customers a flat per order fee to collect, sanitise and redistribute their packaging.

Lixea, London

Tackling the issue of unsustainable materials, Lixea’s BioFlex process takes any type of woody biomass that normally would be unrecyclable and separates the components to make them usable by converting them to products such as high-quality fine and bulk chemicals, bioplastics, renewable fibres and biofuels once again. It does this by using low-cost, environmentally friendly solvents, called liquid salts or ionic liquids.

Reath, Edinburgh

The true extent of the environmental and climatic impact of our throwaway culture is becoming worryingly clear. Reath enables businesses to break the pattern and transition away from single-use, by applying track and trace technology to solve the data problems inherent in reuse models. It is currently developing the world's first global open data standard for reusable packaging.

Topolytics, Edinburgh

Topolytics analyses waste at scale and generates invaluable insights for the recycling industry and waste management sector, preventing more materials from ending up in landfills or seeping out into nature. By using data science, it makes the world’s waste visible, verifiable and valuable. Analysing data on commercial, industrial and post-consumer waste from multiple sources and systems, it uses machine learning and mapping to make sense of this complex combination of materials.

Supply chain

Circulor, London

Manufacturing and recycling supply chains are complex, global and often involve dealing with human rights or environmental issues. Circulor empowers businesses to fully manage their supply chains and drive responsible sourcing and recycling. Circulor creates an immutable record of the chain of custody of materials, linking the end products to their source. This traceability data also enables organisations to make informed decisions to reduce their carbon footprint.

Environmental footprinting 

Earthly, London

Earthly is a tech platform giving businesses a new way to lead the fight against climate change. Focused on natural carbon removal, Earthly helps businesses invest in natural climate solutions that take them beyond carbon-neutrality to become climate-positive. Investments support projects that protect, restore and re-establish crucial ecosystems like forests, peatlands, mangroves and seabeds. Each project is vetted by an independent scientific board, monitored by satellite, and visualised on a shareable immersive platform.

Giki Social Enterprise, London

The average UK carbon footprint is 9 tonnes per person per year. To help people live more sustainably, Giki’s mobile app enables people to find more sustainable and healthy products in UK supermarkets. Giki Zero is an interactive, step by step guide to a sustainable life, which helps people to understand, track and reduce their environmental footprint, drive change through their own actions and set their own personal path towards net zero.

Offsetting

Ecologi, Bristol

Ecologi (formerly Offset Earth) is a subscription service for carbon consumption, kind of like Netflix for the planet. With the overarching aim to avoid two thirds of all carbon emissions, individuals and businesses can remove their carbon footprints by subscribing to grow their own forests or contribute to other carbon reducing activities. Customers have complete transparency to where their money goes each month, and can set themselves personalised eco goals.

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