#34 Kestrix
The Google Maps for heat loss in buildings
Read time: 3 minutes
Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.
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Today we’ll distill a company that’s revolutionizing building retrofits with 3D thermal imaging and AI insights: Kestrix 🇬🇧
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What Problem Does Kestrix Tackle❓
They deal with the problem of energy inefficiency and the challenges associated with scaling building retrofits. Here are some more details:
1. Energy Inefficiency in Buildings: In the UK, 17% of emissions come from heating and cooling buildings.
2. Scale of Retrofit Needed: To meet 2050 net zero targets, 1.8 building retrofits must be completed every minute.
3. Resource Constraints: Limited resources such as labour, financial capital, and time hinder the efficient execution of retrofit projects.
4. Lack of Data and Awareness: There is no scalable, cost-effective way to reliably determine how heat is lost across millions of buildings, leading to misallocated budgets and wasted resources.
Product / Service 📦
Kestrix utilizes drone-enabled mass thermal image capture and AI to map heat loss from buildings, providing critical data for energy efficiency retrofit planning, pricing, and verification. Just in case you wonder why it’s awesome:
Visual Heat Loss Identification: Thermal imaging shows where heat leaks from buildings, helping identify areas needing insulation or other energy-efficient improvements.
Scalable and Cost-Effective: This method eliminates the need for expensive and time-consuming on-site surveys, reducing costs and wait times.
Personalized Retrofit Plans: The AI-driven system generates tailored retrofit plans, including estimates of the cost and effectiveness of various interventions, helping users make informed decisions.
Remote Verification: Users can track the progress of retrofitting efforts and verify the outcomes remotely, ensuring that energy efficiency goals are met efficiently.
This service empowers homeowners, housing providers, and local governments, to make data-driven decisions to improve the energy efficiency of their buildings. 🏡
Market 🌐
The building energy efficiency market is poised for significant growth driven by sustainability goals, regulations, and technological innovation in smart and energy efficient building solutions. Global 2023 market value at $125.84 billion, with Europe capturing most of it and Asia expected to be the fastest growing region.
Other Key Players
Enter 🇩🇪: They have homeowners complete a digital survey, then give them an assessment of the energy status of their building, and suggestions on how to reduce their inefficiencies.
Accacia 🇸🇬: Provides an AI-enabled SaaS platform for real estate developers and asset managers to measure and benchmark environmental risks, and suggests decarbonization strategies at the asset and portfolio level.
Founding Story 🦄
Kestrix, was founded in 2022 by Lucy Lyons and her co-founder Matt Goodridge.
Lucy has a robust background in climate tech, sustainability, and urban design. She previously worked at Plan A, a carbon accounting software firm in Berlin.
Matt has extensive experience in product management, having worked at Google for 10 years and many other companies in the high tech, MedTech, and telecoms sectors.
They met when they joined the Carbon13 cohort, a program that brings together entrepreneurs to launch ventures aimed at reducing emissions.
They started Kestrix to address the significant energy inefficiency in buildings, particularly in the UK (their home country) where 17% of emissions come from heating and cooling. In September 2023, they raised £500k in a pre-seed funding round from investors including Notion Capital and several angel investors to develop their technology further.
Top Impact Stats 📈
They project achieving 11Mt CO2e reduction (amortized) per year by year 12 of operating.
Their goal is to enable retrofitting 1.8 homes every minute between now and 2050 to meet net zero targets in the UK.
Kestrix aims to reduce the time for thermal performance assessment from 2-3 hours of manual work to seconds using their AI and drone technology.
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