Investing in our growing community

Exciting investment news

For those of you already following or using equiwatt, you might already have spotted that we recently had some great news about investment to support our business growth. 

If you haven’t then you can get straight to the details and read about it in some of the media coverage here, here and here.

But we wanted to use this post to tell you a bit more about what it means to us and more importantly, our community of members.

Ultimately, the investment means we can now go even faster and be even better on a bigger scale than we have to date. Faster with our product development, better with our rewards and customer experience, bigger with our ambitions to grow the community.

Start-up mentality

Although we have new investment, we are still very much a start up. By that, we mean that we are a small (yet agile) team who get involved in everything and learn at an incredibly fast pace to try and create something that meets the expectations of our brilliant community members.

Things can be both difficult and frustrating when you’re trying to learn how to do something that you’ve never done before(!) Especially when you can’t easily resource or pay someone to do it for you. But that also creates brilliant opportunities to learn new things and get hands-on in creating a lasting foundation for equiwatt.

And when we don’t quite get things right, it’s the underdog mentality of a start-up that keeps us motivated. And we are very aware that many people in our community have supported us because they like to back a start-up. Especially technology start-ups who are disrupting the norm and doing something good for consumers.

A big thank you

It’s that support that is one of the most important things we wanted to say thank you for in this post. 

First and foremost a huge energy saving thank you goes out to our community members who continue to support what we’re doing. We have been trialling equiwatt technology for the past 2 years throughout the UK and the input and continuous belief in our idea has been invaluable. So thank you.

We have also been supported by some brilliant teams at ECCI Climate-KIC, Newcastle University and the Energy Systems Catapult. All of whom share our passion for achieving Net-Zero and creating a cleaner energy system through technology. There are too many brilliant people to cover in this post but thank you to everyone.

The final big thanks goes to the teams at Mercia and Williams Ali for believing in our vision and helping to make the investment happen.

Global pandemic notwithstanding!

And in case you hadn’t noticed, things have been a bit tough in business land over the past few months. We count ourselves very fortunate to be a business that has not been badly impacted by the random and indiscriminate impact of Covid-19. We are very mindful that many entrepreneurs out there will have experienced difficult times and our team sincerely hope that the future turns more positive as soon as possible.

If anything, the past 6 months have taught us some valuable lessons.

For a start, technology is, more than ever, a critical part of our future. Pandemic or not, there remains a growing and compelling need to use technology to digitise our energy systems. We have been able to continue building and running equiwatt from wherever we are online. And that is also thanks to technology. In fact, our community Equivents have been activated and managed from any of Gateshead (UK), Mexico City (Mexico) and Columbo (Sri Lanka) over the past 6 months!

Likewise, it has also heightened the focus on how we use energy when we’re all spending more time at home - not least as we head into the darker and colder Autumn and Winter months (sorry!). equiwatt users have understandably become more engaged and keener to understand the difference they can make on their energy usage when they’re at home. We’re as excited as ever that we can continue to build up our community of peak time energy savers who can make an even bigger impact right now.

Just the start

Collectively switching off household appliances at the same time is the simplest form of what we do. There are 19 million households in the UK. They contribute at least 22% of all CO2 emissions. And we are all part of those numbers. If just 10% of all UK households joined equiwatt, we could collectively reduce CO2 by about 0.475 million tonnes a year. 

But we’re only just getting started. We’ll be continuously developing, testing, researching and listening to our community members even when we do get to millions of households. Please keep in touch with your ideas and thoughts through hello@equiwatt.com and help us build an experience that everyone loves.

And of course, if you think you can help to get us there as a community, then give your friends, family and networks a nudge and let them know what we’re doing!