Company: Genous
Founder: Simon Bones
Website: https://genous.earth/
About Genous
Genous is the UK’s premier home retrofit company, making customers’ homes more energy efficient and environmentally friendly and thereby driving down bills. In an industry with weak data, poor service and limited customer knowledge, Genous shines a light by bringing innovative tech, the best products and unrivalled customer service to inform, advise and – most importantly – get improvements made.
CEO and founder Simon Bones is an exited entrepreneur who created Genous in 2022 following his own challenges retrofitting several homes and his passion to mitigate climate change (he’s also a published academic in climate change science at Bristol University), and hired a crack team of industry veterans, technologists and supply chain experts to do something different.
Together, they have built the UK’s most sophisticated, accurate and flexible digital home twinning technology platform, assessed and selected the most effective and high-performance products and interventions available, and built a supply chain of high-performing installers to deliver to their specifications.
Genous’s technology allows a customer to get accurate costings, payback and impact of dozens of different potential changes, both individually and when carried out in combination – the latter being critical in an electrified scenario with heat pumps, solar panels and electric vehicles all working together. The team can then advise on the best options and work to particular customer priorities and budgets, rather than following default recommendations as with an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC).
Uniquely across the UK able-to-pay market, Genous works across the retrofit product set: all major insulation types are covered (including cavity and solid wall, loft, floor, roof-room and flat roof) as well as glazing & doors, solar, heat-pumps and smart-tech. Genous contracts directly with the householder under its own accreditations and supports with local authority and electricity company planning permissions, thereby taking full responsibility and acting as a single point of contact.
Genous works directly with customers but also with leading mortgage lenders to advise and support their customers through retrofit, and with builders and architects wanting to integrate home efficiency into renovation projects.
Mortgage lenders in particular are likely to be critical to more widespread acceptance of home retrofit outside the subsidised market, as a typical spend of £10,000 and upwards means that currently, most customers are at the wealthy end of the spectrum whereas mortgage companies have the power, alongside Genous, to democratise this.
The company is values-driven; its core purpose is to mitigate climate change, it actively supports SMEs in local communities as installer partners, it has no salespeople on commission and customers are regularly advised not to do things if they are not consistent with their objectives. Simon has spoken about customer protection to MPs at the Energy Security and Net Zero Select Committee and regularly contributes advice to the press on retrofit advice.
Genous has taken multiple clients through the home retrofit journey, including single-measure implementations (solar, heat pumps or integration) and multi-tech journeys incorporating all the above and more.
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