Buildings
16% of 37 billion tonnes per year
Decarbonisation Pathway| 8 Sectorsmore details
| Sector | Emissions today | Decarbonisation pathway |
|---|---|---|
| Heating & cooling | Very high — space heating is the dominant end-use, overwhelmingly gas and oil boilers in existing stock; cooling is already electric but growing fast as climate warms, with refrigerant F-gases an additional GHG concern | Heat pumps are the solution for both and are commercially mature; retrofit of existing stock is the bottleneck, not technology; F-gas refrigerant transition (away from HFCs) runs in parallel |
| Water heating | High — gas-dominated in most markets | Faster mover than space heating — shorter replacement cycles and lower capital cost accelerate the switch to heat pump water heaters |
| Cooking | Moderate — gas dominant in commercial kitchens and many households | Electrifying steadily — induction is mature and often preferred on performance; regulation driving faster transition in some markets |
| Lighting & appliances | Moderate in aggregate — largely electric already | Largely solved — LED transition well advanced; appliance efficiency standards driving steady improvement |
| Commercial | High — offices, retail, hotels, hospitals; large floor areas and 24-hour operation in some cases | Active transition — commercial PPAs, building energy codes, and net zero commitments from large corporates driving investment; retrofit of existing stock the main challenge |
| Residential | Very high in aggregate — largest sub-category by number of assets | Slow at scale — millions of individual decisions, high upfront costs, split incentive problem between landlords and tenants; policy the key unlock |
| Building insullation | Significant — poorly insulated buildings increase heating and cooling demand | Steady improvement — insulation, double glazing, and passive design reduce demand before generation or fuel source matters; the efficiency layer that determines how much electrification is needed |
| Construction | High — steel, cement and materials in new buildings; excluded from operational emissions but significant over lifecycle | Early stage — low-carbon materials, mass timber, and embodied carbon accounting beginning to enter mainstream procurement |
Chemicals & Materials
Fossil fuels are not just the energy source for chemicals — they are the raw material. Decarbonising the sector means replacing the feedstock, not just the furnace.
Atomic Tessellator
FeaturedNew Zealand
Atomic Tessellator builds the computational infrastructure for advanced materials development. The platform allows organisations to explore thousands of material candidates through simulation, committing physical resources only to high-confidence options — compressing development cycles from months or years to days.
Headquartered in Auckland, New Zealand, the company targets defence, aerospace, and advanced engineering customers who face extreme material performance requirements. Use cases include new materials for EV batteries, carbon capture, fusion reactors, and replacing substances under regulatory scrutiny (PFAS, microplastics). The platform is built on ab-initio (first principles) methods, GPU-accelerated infrastructure, and AI-driven simulation, deployed via hosted cloud, dedicated cloud, or on-premise.
Founders
Investors
Google Accelerator, Outset Ventures, Salus Ventures, Side Stage Ventures
Hysata
FeaturedAustralia
The economics of green hydrogen have always come down to one problem: electricity is the dominant input cost, and existing electrolysers waste too much of it.
Hysata's fundamentally different approach uses a capillary-fed electrolysis cell underpinned by two key innovations: an ultra-low resistance separator and bubble-free operation — eliminating the primary sources of energy loss in conventional designs and achieving 95% system efficiency, a step change that already exceeds IRENA's efficiency target for 2050.
The commercial implications are significant.
The increased efficiency produces 580kg of green hydrogen per day per MW of electrolyser capacity, compared to around 470kg for incumbent systems, and could save green hydrogen producers an estimated US$3 billion in renewables capex for a typical one million tonne per annum project.
The design also simplifies manufacturing — generating far less waste heat, requiring twenty times less liquid per megawatt than a conventional alkaline electrolyser, and lending itself to modular, scalable production.
Founders
PlasmaLeap
FeaturedAustralia
Conventional ammonia production via the Haber-Bosch process is one of the most energy-intensive and emissions-heavy industrial processes on earth, consuming around 1–2% of global energy and responsible for a significant portion of the fertiliser sector's N₂O footprint. The process is also inherently centralised — large plants, long supply chains, and significant transportation and storage risk.
PlasmaLeap has developed a zero-emissions ammonia synthesis process that consumes only air and water, powered by variable renewable electricity, with pilot units on track to demonstrate world-leading energy efficiency rates competitive with traditional ammonia production.
The modular units generate cost-competitive green nitrogen fertiliser on-demand and on-farm. It is decentralised and safe — deployable on-farm or on-site for industrial settings, avoiding transportation risks and eliminating the risk of large-scale combustion or explosion associated with conventional ammonia handling.
Founders
Investors
Investible, Gates Foundation
Carbonova
Canada
Carbonova converts captured CO₂ into high-value carbon nanofibers — a superior reinforcing material for composites, concrete, and batteries — creating a commercial incentive to capture industrial emissions.
czero
USA
CZero produces clean hydrogen by thermally decomposing natural gas into hydrogen and solid carbon — a turquoise hydrogen pathway that avoids CO₂ emissions and produces a sequestrable solid byproduct.
MCI Carbon
Australia
MCi Carbon converts CO₂ from hard-to-abate industrial emitters into solid building materials (carbonates and silica) via mineral carbonation — permanently sequestering carbon in products that replace conventional construction materials, with its Myrtle demonstration plant now operational.
Mint Bio
New Zealand
New Zealand green chemistry company using biology to recover gold, palladium and copper from e-waste — replacing toxic cyanide and acid processes with a microbial approach that extracts precious metals from circuit boards at commercial scale.
Mitra Chem
USA
US battery materials startup using machine learning and high-throughput synthesis to develop next-generation iron-based cathode materials — bringing LFP-class safety and cost to a broader range of EV and storage applications with a domestic US supply chain.
Samsara Eco
Australia
Samsara Eco has engineered enzymes that break any plastic back to virgin-quality monomers regardless of colour or contamination — enabling true infinite plastic recycling at ambient temperatures.
Commercial
CEP Energy
FeaturedAustralia
CEP Energy is an Australian clean energy developer that structures energy projects on commercial and industrial sites using a behind-the-meter model: they fund, build, and own solar PV and battery systems on customer sites and charge the customer for the energy consumed, typically at a discount to the grid. The property owner or business gets clean energy and lower bills without any capital outlay or operational burden; CEP earns revenue from the energy sold and potentially from grid services provided by the aggregated battery fleet. CEP targets large commercial and industrial sites — shopping centres, logistics warehouses, food manufacturers — where behind-the-meter economics are most compelling. The company manages a growing portfolio of assets and is backed by institutional infrastructure investors.
Advanced Microgrid Solutions
USA
Advanced Microgrid Solutions deploys AI-optimised behind-the-meter batteries at commercial and industrial sites — reducing energy costs through demand charge management and grid service participation.
AICE Power
France
AI-powered energy monitoring platform for commercial buildings — disaggregating consumption by usage and zone to surface inefficiencies in real time, at 5% of the cost of a traditional Building Management System.
Box Power
USA
Box Power delivers pre-wired, containerised solar-plus-battery microgrids that can be shipped and deployed at any remote location — providing clean, reliable power where grid connection is unavailable.
Bueno Analytics
Australia
Bueno Analytics provides continuous energy monitoring and fault detection for commercial buildings — identifying waste and optimisation opportunities that building managers would otherwise miss.
Clearview Technologies
UK
ClearVue makes transparent solar glazing that generates electricity from UV and infrared light while maintaining clear visible light transmission — turning windows and facades into generating assets.
Flow Power
Australia
Flow Power is an Australian renewable energy retailer connecting commercial and industrial businesses directly to renewable generators — providing cheaper, cleaner energy with active load management.
Infinity PV
Denmark
Danish company commercialising printed organic solar cells — ultra-thin, lightweight, flexible photovoltaic films manufactured via roll-to-roll printing, for applications where conventional rigid silicon panels cannot be used.
Luxwall
USA
LuxWall makes ultra-thin vacuum-insulated glass panels that dramatically cut thermal transfer through windows — reducing heating costs by up to 45% and cooling costs by up to 20% compared to conventional glazing.
Power Ledger
Australia
Power Ledger is an Australian blockchain-based platform enabling peer-to-peer energy trading, allowing households and businesses to buy and sell solar energy directly with each other.
Termina
Australia
Termina is an energy management platform for multi-site businesses that automates bill auditing, tariff optimisation, and contract procurement — turning complex energy costs into managed savings.
Ubiquitous Energy
USA
Ubiquitous Energy developed UE Power — a transparent thin-film coating that turns windows into solar panels by harvesting invisible UV and IR light while letting visible light through, with pilot installations at Michigan State University and a partnership with Andersen Windows.
We Power
Lithuania
WePower is a blockchain-based platform connecting renewable energy buyers directly with generators through long-term power purchase agreements, streamlining a process that traditionally takes months of negotiation.
Zen Ecosystems
Australia
Zen Ecosystems provides intelligent energy management hardware and software for multi-site commercial businesses, optimising HVAC, refrigeration, and lighting to cut energy costs by up to 25%.
Heating & Cooling
Brick AI
FeaturedUSA
AI-native autonomous control platform for commercial and industrial buildings — using reinforcement learning and a universal hardware gateway to actively shape electrical demand, cut peak loads by 30%+ and deliver verified energy savings without disrupting operations.
Their insight, forged from direct experience with grid-constrained buildings, is that the energy transition is fundamentally a demand control problem: US commercial facilities waste an estimated $250B annually not because they lack power, but because legacy Building Management Systems are static, rules-based and incapable of adapting to real-time grid conditions. Demand charges alone can represent 30–40% of a facility's electricity bill. Brick's thesis is that an AI-native closed-loop control layer — sitting between existing BMS infrastructure and the grid — can structurally solve this.
The Brick platform has three interlocking components. A universal hardware gateway installs in under ten minutes and connects to any existing BMS or HVAC system regardless of brand — a deliberately brand-agnostic approach that incumbent vendors like Siemens and Schneider are structurally disincentivised to replicate, since their own business models depend on proprietary hardware lock-in. A reinforcement learning model then runs a continuous closed-loop optimisation, shaping electrical load in real time to stay within fixed grid limits while maintaining occupant comfort. ,
Founders
Conry Tech
FeaturedAustralia
Air conditioning is responsible for roughly 15% of global electricity consumption and accounts for up to 60% of a commercial building's power use — yet the fundamental architecture of HVAC systems has remained largely unchanged for a century.
Conry Tech system is targeting commercial buildings and data centres, and their approach centres on decentralisation: instead of large centralised plant rooms serving entire buildings through long duct runs, their system places small, ultra-efficient modular units close to the zones they serve. This dramatically reduces the energy wasted moving conditioned air through buildings, and allows each zone to be controlled independently, improving both efficiency and occupant comfort.
Ron Conry is one of the most consequential inventors in the history of HVAC — responsible for the world's first modular chiller and, most significantly, the Turbocor oil-free magnetic bearing centrifugal compressor, the most important technological breakthrough in the industry in over 40 years. Turbocor became a global standard and is now a dominant technology worldwide and is estimated to have saved over a gigaton of CO₂ emissions.
Founders
75F
USA
75F provides predictive cloud-based building automation that uses weather forecasts and occupancy data to pre-condition HVAC systems — cutting energy use by 25–40% compared to reactive control systems.
Dandelion Energy
USA
Dandelion Energy makes ground-source heat pumps accessible to homeowners by using proprietary low-cost drilling technology — delivering more efficient heating and cooling than air-source alternatives.
Hysopt
Belgium
Hysopt provides physics-based HVAC simulation software that lets engineers model, simulate, and optimise complete heating and cooling installations before construction — cutting energy use by 30% and CO₂ emissions by 40% versus conventionally designed systems.
qvantum
Sweden
Qvantum is a Swedish heat pump manufacturer making modular, propane-refrigerant heat pumps for urban European buildings — with integrated thermal batteries and grid-flexibility software that turn each unit into a dispatchable asset in a virtual power plant.
Tepeo
UK
Tepeo makes the ZEB — a Zero Emission Boiler that replaces gas boilers by charging its thermal core with cheap off-peak electricity and discharging heat on demand, using existing pipework and radiators with no structural changes.
Turntide
USA
Turntide makes switched reluctance Smart Motors controlled by proprietary software — delivering average 64% energy savings in commercial HVAC systems with no rare earth materials, backed by US DOE certification as the world’s most efficient motor.
Residential
Amber Electric
FeaturedAustralia
As the role of grids shifts to connecting intermittent supply with moveable demand, firms that can use software and data to match the two will prosper.
Amber enables customers to access real-time wholesale energy prices. More importantly, SmartShift™ automates the charge & discharge of your battery (or EV) for maximum saving & return.
Founders
Investors
Brighte
FeaturedAustralia
Brighte operates as a buy-now-pay-later and renewables loan platform for home energy upgrades in Australia. Homeowners use Brighte to finance solar installations, battery storage, heat pumps, and EV chargers through zero-interest payment plans or low-rate green loans, with the installer receiving payment immediately and Brighte collecting repayments from the customer over time. This removes the upfront cost barrier that prevents many households from adopting clean energy upgrades even when the long-term economics are positive. Brighte has facilitated over $1 billion in financing for Australian homeowners and works with a network of thousands of approved energy installers across the country.
Founders
Investors
SPAN
FeaturedUSA
The conventional circuit breaker panel is a 1950s technology designed for a world where electricity only flowed one way and loads were simple and static. SPAN's smart panel replaces it with a connected device that monitors every circuit in real time, enables individual circuit control via an app, and intelligently manages the interactions between solar, batteries, EVs, and the grid. This matters because the electrification of homes — heat pumps, EV chargers, induction cooktops — is creating new peak demand patterns and grid interactions that passive panels cannot manage. SPAN also enables load-shedding during power outages, prioritising critical circuits when running on battery backup.
Founders
Investors
Aira
Sweden
Aira's heat pumps are controlled by an app that adjusts activity based on the weather forecast, learns when a customer showers, and optimises accordingly — combining hardware installation with intelligent energy management.
Dandelion Energy
US-based geothermal heating and cooling company making ground-source heat pumps simple and affordable for homes — with the highest-efficiency heat pump on the market and a new leasing model that eliminates upfront cost.
Harvest Thermal
USA
Harvest Thermal turns heat pump water heaters into smart thermal batteries — shifting energy consumption to cheap, clean periods and providing demand response capability to utilities.
Kelvin
USA
New York-based building decarbonisation company whose smart radiator covers, heat pumps and thermal batteries cut heating costs by 25%+ in legacy steam-heated apartment buildings — making Local Law 97 compliance affordable for owners of NYC's century-old housing stock.
Kraken
UK
Kraken is Octopus Energy's technology platform for energy utilities — a cloud-based operating system that manages billing, customer engagement, smart devices, and energy trading at scale.
Lavo
Australia
UNSW spinout commercialising the world's first integrated hybrid hydrogen home battery — combining a solar electrolyser, solid metal hydride storage and a fuel cell to deliver ~40 kWh of safe, multi-day energy independence for homes and commercial buildings.
Leap
USA
The leading US platform for building and scaling virtual power plants — aggregating batteries, EV chargers and smart building assets from 80+ technology partners into grid services programmes, with over 1 GW enrolled.
Limejump
UK
UK-based virtual power plant pioneer aggregating distributed renewables, batteries and flexible demand into balancing markets — acquired by Shell in 2019 as one of the defining early transactions in the decentralised energy transition.
Lumin
USA
US home energy management platform that retrofits existing circuit breaker panels with smart circuit control — extending battery backup, optimising time-of-use costs and enabling demand response without replacing the panel.
National Renewable Network
Australia
NRN installs solar and battery systems in Australian homes at zero upfront cost, owning and maintaining the infrastructure while households simply pay for cheaper energy — acting as a distributed energy infrastructure platform connecting consumers, retailers, and investors.
Nemy
Australia
Free Australian app that tracks real-time electricity prices and renewable generation in the National Electricity Market, letting consumers and smart home devices automatically shift usage to cheap, green moments in the grid.
Ohmie Go
Australia
Ohmie Go provides a fully managed EV charging platform for apartment buildings — handling hardware, software, billing, and grid management so developers and body corporates don't have to.
Polarium
Sweden
Polarium is a Swedish lithium-ion battery company providing modular, high-performance energy storage systems for telecom infrastructure, utilities, and commercial and industrial applications.
Quantum Energy
Australia
Quantum Energy is an Australian heat pump hot water manufacturer with over 40 years of history — producing air-source systems that achieve COP ~4 at 25°C, operate to -10°C without a booster element, and reduce hot water energy costs by up to 70%.
RadBot
UK
Vestemi’s Radbot is an occupancy-sensing smart TRV that screws onto existing radiators with no app, WiFi, or tools required — using light sensors and an embedded AI to heat rooms only when occupied, saving up to 30% on gas bills.
Shower Canary
Australia
Shower Canary is a New Zealand IoT shower timer that attaches to any showerhead without plumbing, senses water flow, and transmits real-time usage data to an app via cellular IoT — helping households cut shower time and save ~$700 per year in water and energy costs.
Stirbel Eltron
Germany
Stiebel Eltron is a German manufacturer of heat pumps, electric water heaters, and ventilation systems — one of the most established and respected brands in the European heat pump market.
Sunex
Poland
Sunex is Poland’s leading manufacturer of renewable heating products — designing and producing heat pumps, solar collectors, PV systems, and integrated hybrid heating packages entirely at its Polish factory, with ~85% of revenues from export markets led by Germany and Austria.
Totex
Australia
Totex has developed a 3-in-1 heat pump system that provides space heating, space cooling, and hot water from a single integrated loop with large thermal storage — capturing waste heat from cooling to produce hot water at no extra energy cost, with a measured COP of ~6.8.
Uplight
USA
Uplight is a US software platform that helps electric and gas utilities engage customers and orchestrate flexible energy assets — turning smart thermostats, EV chargers, batteries, and water heaters into a dispatchable virtual power plant.
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