Hark is an energy analytics and industrial Internet-of-Things company. Founded in 2016, Hark’s core mission is to help the world become more efficient. We achieve this by giving enterprises a connected overview of their energy-using assets across their estate – helping to improve efficiency, reduce waste and maximise yield through automation, visibility and data analysis of these assets.
When connected to the Hark platform, businesses can quickly identify shortfalls in their energy efficiency in real-time, giving them actionable information that can help reduce their carbon footprint and operational costs. Sometimes this can be as simple as providing visibility of poorly performing systems (Such as heating, ventilation, air-conditioning and lighting, etc.) at a single site, or helping improve margins across a business’ entire estate.
We work with a number of businesses across different industries including manufacturing, energy, and facilities management as well as some of the UK’s leading retailers.
How did you come up with the idea for the company?
We originally founded Hark with the intention of helping pharmaceutical companies – which often suffer from a lack of visibility across their labs – to run more efficiently by connecting sensors and reducing waste. At first, myself and our other founders only worked part-time, running the business as and when the work came in.
Soon enough however, we realised it wasn’t just pharmaceutical companies facing these challenges, but also retailers, energy firms and manufacturing companies – and after securing some initial seed funding, myself and the team were able to commit full-time.
Several years down the line, and with some impressive customer case-studies under our belt, we’ve managed to build a proven platform that is helping to improve efficiency at an enterprise level.
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How has the company evolved during the pandemic?
We’ve been fortunate that Hark is structured and run in such a way which allows for home-working, meaning we were able to quickly adapt to lockdowns and working from home Government guidance.
Although some of the projects in our pipeline were delayed because of lockdowns, it actually ended up working in our favour as it gave us the opportunity to re-focus on our product roadmap. We’ve built a new platform module plus a series of online tools which helped to enhance our offering overall.
Because of the size of the projects we were working on too, we knew they would pick up again quickly when things returned to normal, as the problems we are helping our customers solve aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
What can we hope to see from Hark in the future?
With COP26 having come to a close at the end of last year, we’re expecting a lot more businesses will now be reflecting on how they can be more efficient in terms of their carbon emissions, and energy efficiency – particularly in line with the new expectations the government has outlined with regards to meeting Net Zero by 2030.
With this in mind, we’re looking forward to having more conversations with businesses in 2022 that are determined to make a change. As part of this, we’re also keen to expand our offering into new industries and verticals – broadening Hark’s value proposition, while also expanding our measurement capabilities to cater to new businesses.
Beyond this, we’re not ruling out looking beyond the UK in terms of our growth, and we’re excited to see where Hark’s journey will take us.
