Company: Kestrix
CEO, CTO: Lucy Lyons, Matt Goodridge
Website: https://www.kestrix.io/
About Kestrix
Kestrix was founded in 2022 to solve one of the most urgent and overlooked challenges in the climate and housing sectors: the lack of accurate, scalable data on how heat escapes from buildings. Without this knowledge, governments, energy providers and housing organisations cannot plan or verify retrofit work effectively. Since the built environment is responsible for a large share of national CO2emissions, improving this knowledge base is essential for a fair and rapid transition to net zero.
We started by developing a new method to measure and model the thermal performance of thousands of homes at a time. Our approach combines aerial thermal imagery, advanced machine learning, and building physics to create detailed assessments of heat loss, estimated U values, energy use per square metre, and specific retrofit recommendations. Instead of relying on slow and costly on site evaluations, Kestrix delivers these insights remotely, consistently and with far greater speed. This removes a major bottleneck in the retrofit supply chain and enables local authorities and energy providers to plan programmes at city scale.
The journey to this point has not been simple. One major challenge was the technical complexity required to transform raw thermal imagery into highly accurate, actionable energy models. This required extensive research, algorithm development, and validation using ground truth data. Another challenge was ensuring that the insights could be communicated in a way that residents, building manager and non technical stakeholders could understand. To address this, we invested heavily in user centred design, testing communication formats with households in Coventry, Islington and the Isle of Wight. These efforts led to highly positive feedback and stronger resident engagement and higher participation on retrofit programmes.
A further challenge was proving that our technology could operate reliably at scale. We overcame this by partnering with 18 organisations including: E.ON, Coventry City Council, Islington Council, Clarion and Peabody to test and refine the system through real world pilots. These projects demonstrated that Kestrix can assess communities more than one hundred times faster than traditional methods while maintaining high accuracy. They also showed that our data directly influences planning decisions, funding allocations and resource prioritisation.
The impact on the industry has been significant. Kestrix is now establishing a new standard for retrofit intelligence by providing a consistent data layer that supports planning, pricing and verification. This is particularly important as public bodies look for transparency and evidence in decarbonisation programmes. Our approach reduces audit costs by more than 50%, improves accountability in public spending, and gives both residents and decision makers a clear understanding of where action is needed.
Kestrix is also helping shift the industry from reactive, survey based processes toward proactive, data driven strategy. This new model supports local authorities, utilities, housing associations and national networks in making informed decisions that lead to measurable carbon reduction. As we scale across the United Kingdom and into international markets, our ambition is to help transform how the built environment is assessed and upgraded, contributing to a faster, fairer and fully verifiable energy transition.
Check out what TechRound can do for your business: SEO, PR, HR Software, Payroll Software, IT, VoIP.
