£500k in funding for the Google Maps of Heat Loss
London, United Kingdom – Today, Kestrix announces a £500k pre-seed round to build the Google Maps of Heat loss – and realise a future in which every building is low carbon and energy efficient.
In the UK alone, 17% of emissions come from heating and cooling buildings, and 1.8 retrofits must happen every minute between now and 2050 for net zero targets to be met. Luckily, technology (like good old insulation) to fix the problem exists. But when resources required for such a herculean undertaking – labour, financial, time – are limited, how can we be sure we are starting in the right places? Allocating the right budgets? Doing the work well?
Today, we can’t. That’s right: there is no scalable, cost-effective way of knowing (reliably) how heat is lost across the millions of buildings we all live, work, and play in – let alone how to fix it and how much fixes will cost. This leads to lost time, wasted resources, and overspent budgets for those executing on building decarbonisation projects now – like housing providers, local governments, contractors, and energy companies.
That’s why Kestrix is here: to solve retrofit’s data problem, and unlock the efficient allocation of scarce retrofit resources. Using mass thermal image capture and AI, Kestrix will map how heat is leaking from buildings at scale, and build tools around a proprietary heat-loss dataset to streamline energy performance benchmarking, as well as retrofit planning, pricing, and verification. The vision is to enable housing providers, energy utilities, and local governments to direct energy efficiency spending effectively and verify outcomes remotely, and at a fraction of the cost and time it takes today.
The pre-seed round closed oversubscribed in just under 3 months, with participation from Notion Capital, Carbon13, and prolific angel investors including the founders of Vivid Economics (Cameron Hepburn), Kontor (Luke Appleby), Comply Advantage (Charlie Delingpole), and Peakon (Phil Chambers). Investor conviction in Kestrix is strong: “Without data, decisions aren't made, projects aren't financed, and outcomes aren't verified.” said Charlie Delingpole, Kestrix investor. “With a clear vision to become the data layer for building retrofit the industry so desperately needs in a way that is scalable and defensible, supporting Kestrix felt obvious.”
New investment in Kestrix will supercharge product development. Specifically, it will finance the development of automated Rapid Thermal Performance Assessment (RaThPA) machine learning algorithms, which – in combination with aerial thermal imaging – will estimate energy performance of a building in seconds at a fraction of the cost, requiring no in-person site visit. Kestrix will build planning, pricing, and verification tools around this data to enable streamlined asset management for customers.
Kestrix is open for customer pilots in Fall 2023. If you are interested for your organisation, please contact CEO Lucy at lucy@kestrix.io.
