Investment spurs innovation
Accelerating decarbonisation is one of the most pressing issues of our time, and one of the most critical challenges for the UK government to achieve its 2050 net zero ambitions is improving the energy efficiency of 19 million homes across the country.
This was highlighted in the Committee on Climate Change’s latest annual progress report to Parliament, which singled out the energy efficiency of housing as one of the main areas where the government was making slow progress.
Part of the challenge is that despite widely available advice and information, many homeowners are reluctant to retrofit their properties. This can be attributed to a number of reasons, ranging from low levels of awareness about available home energy improvement solutions and their benefits to a poor grasp of the advice and financial support available.
One of the key drivers for founding Heero Technologies last year was to help householders make sense of retrofitting and decarbonisation in the quest for energy efficient homes. Our goal was to develop an app to guide homeowners through the entire retrofit journey while streamlining the user experience, thus helping to overcome the multitude of barriers and complex guidance homeowners encounter when trying to reduce their energy bills.
Over the past year we have made tremendous progress. We have developed an app that not only delivers personalised home energy efficiency recommendations, but also addresses challenges such as the disruption caused by invasive retrofit measures, confusion over financing and government grants for energy efficiency, the lack of flexibility and choice over technology, which installers to use, not to mention which manufacturer. Essentially, the Heero App enables homeowners and landlords to navigate home energy efficiency improvements seamlessly and conveniently via their Smartphone.
However, developing technology demands substantial funding. Heero has been fortunate to have investors who have helped accelerate development of the app and contribute to our progress.
In addition to the ongoing support from Shackleton Ventures, we were thrilled to recently welcome TRICAPITAL Angels Limited, Scottish Enterprise and Mint Ventures to our investor base. The combined investment from these three exciting new partners will support our determination to accelerate the adoption of energy efficiency technology and realise our vision of equipping homeowners with the knowledge and tools to make net zero homes a reality. Additionally, it will enable our team to further develop and scale the App and website, unlocking our next phase of growth. This includes the creation of five new roles in the next three months.
Their involvement is a testament to the growing realisation that technology has a vital role to play in addressing environmental challenges – everywhere you look there are amazing innovations taking place – and that there is immense opportunity in cleantech.
It also shows that investment is key to spurring innovation by supporting the start-ups, entrepreneurs and trailblazers who are driving the clean tech revolution.
We hope that investors continue to recognise the benefits of clean tech and that they continue to fund such solutions, thus helping facilitate the large-scale adoption of technology that offers significant and tangible economic, environmental, and social benefits on the road to netzero.