Company: Hot Tin Roof
Founder and CEO: Sarah Lee
Website: https://www.hottinroof.co.uk
About Hot Tin Roof
Hot Tin Roof is a communications and public affairs consultancy for science and technology. Sarah Lee founded it in Edinburgh in 2002, and the team works today from offices above the River Tweed in the Scottish Borders. Our clients are the people building things the rest of us do not yet know we need: robots, clean energy, new materials, medical breakthroughs. Many arrive as startups with a brilliant idea and no idea how to make the world listen. That is where we come in.
We back pioneers early
We have always been drawn to companies doing something genuinely new. We launched FreeAgent when online accounting was still treated with suspicion and its founder was effectively a one-man band. We told the story of cloud computing before most people had heard the phrase, and of reusable digital identity years before “”bring your own identity”” was a thing. And we stay: several of our client relationships have run for more than a decade. When you work with Hot Tin Roof, you work with the senior people doing the thinking, not a junior team you never met in the pitch.
We have changed with the industry
We have come through the 2008 crash, the collapse of the old media model, the rise of search and social, and now generative AI. Each shift changed what clients needed from us, and each time we changed with it. Staying small and senior is a deliberate choice: it keeps the judgement close to the work.
We have tried to move PR forward
Launching FreeAgent left Sarah with a question that would not go away: how much of PR could be automated? The answer became PingGo, a platform that automated the business of PR and the writing formula beneath it. The concept never changed, and Sarah kept pushing it through several versions and developers until FreeAgent founder Ed Molyneux built the one that stuck, which Hot Tin Roof used every day for more than four years. Innovate UK backed, it launched on Product Hunt and AppSumo, where day-one demand broke the tech. It was an early glimpse of how the making of information was about to change. Sarah has also given back to the profession, chairing CIPR Scotland until September 2026 and helping relaunch the Scottish PR Awards.
Where PR goes next
Now anyone can produce content for free, so the scarce thing is judgement: knowing which stories deserve to be heard, and having the credibility to make sure they are. We use AI every day to go deeper and wider, alongside old-fashioned journalism instinct. We think PR has a bigger job than ever as a guardian of truth, reputation and trust. The next challenge we are building for is making sure true stories are the ones found in AI-driven search.
That is the work. Earned trust, well told.
Want to find out what TechRound can do for your business?
