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Welcome to Deeptech From Scratch
This is our new series exploring the often-messy, sometimes-brilliant, and always-audacious journeys of founders tackling the world’s hardest problems. Each profile is released as a podcast episode alongside an accompanying article.
In this inaugural episode, we dive into the world of Hot Green Solutions. Founded by former consultant Georgia and her co-founder Andrew, they've set out to replace industrial boilers, an innovation that could slash global carbon emissions by 10%.
You can listen to the full interview with Georgia here:
How to replace boilers and cut 10% of global emissions
“There are 11,000 boilers sold every year, that’s three boilers a day. If I can switch out three boilers a day for the next 25 years with an industrial heat pump, we’ve tackled 10% of global emissions.”
That’s the audacious calculation driving Hot Green Solutions, a startup co-founded by former consultant Georgia and thermodynamics wizard Andrew. Their aim: make industrial boilers as obsolete as the tungsten filament lightbulb.
The hidden giant of emissions
Industrial heat is “the elephant in the climate tech room.” From pasteurising milk to sterilising pharmaceuticals, it powers the stuff of everyday life. But it’s currently dirty and inefficient.
“You put in one kilowatt of gas energy, and you essentially end up with about 0.7 kilowatts of thermal output,” Georgia says. In total, industrial heat accounts for 20 per cent of global carbon emissions, yet remains largely untouched by innovation.
Why? Gas is cheap, and boilers are easy. “Gas boilers are cheap to buy, cheap to run and easy to install. Other than their emissions, they are a great solution for industry, which is why they’ve been used for over 100 years in broadly the same way.”
This longevity, where equipment must run 24/7 for decades, entrenches incumbents like Siemens and Mitsubishi. And despite public concern about climate change, Georgia is blunt: “Most of the polling is saying industry does care, but it’s however far down the priority list. There is no value in a plant switching to be sustainable in an environmental sense, if they are no longer financially sustainable, as they’d just go out of business.”
Any solution, therefore, has to beat traditional boilers on cost and reliability, not just on emissions.
The isothermal breakthrough
Hot Green Solutions’ edge comes from isothermal compression, a technique that keeps temperature constant during compression. Traditional industrial heat pumps, borrowed from refrigeration, use adiabatic compression, which generates waste heat and limits efficiency.
“What we are doing instead is utilising a different compression type altogether that helps to remove the waste heat and utilise it in a useful way,” Georgia explains.
Isothermal compression isn’t new, it’s been used in hydrogen and liquid air systems, but it’s always been too expensive for mass adoption. Hot Green Solutions claims to have cracked the cost barrier:
“We’ve managed to come up with an innovative manufacturing technique that enables us to build these compressors at a tenth of the cost.”
The result: a system four times as efficient as a gas boiler, built around just three core components. Georgia laughs: “Three blocks which I could hold up each individual and carry them all in my arms.”
From skeptic to evangelist
Georgia never expected to be preaching the gospel of thermodynamics. “I don’t remember once in my life thinking about industrial heat until three years ago… I studied thermodynamics… I can hardly say it was my favourite topic at the time.”
After a decade advising FTSE 100 C-suites, she left a “very well-paid job” in search of climate tech impact, initially eyeing “sexy headline things” like carbon capture or batteries. Then she encountered Hexxcell, a heat exchanger optimisation company, and the penny dropped: industrial heat was indeed the elephant in the room.
Her co-founder, Andrew, she describes as a “thermodynamics wizard,” bringing a PhD and a decade in heating and cooling tech across everything from laser cooling to domestic refrigeration. The two met on LinkedIn. “Commercialisation co-founder, industrial heat,” Georgia recalls reading. “And I was like, my God, this is meant to be.”
Scaling the heat revolution
Hot Green Solutions is building its first demonstrator now, with a customer deployment targeted for late 2026. The startup is currently closing its pre-seed round and hiring a senior heat pump engineer and a head of operations and supply chain.
The team, Georgia says, currently feels like “a jazz band… we’re each fantastic soloists, and when we come together, we make a quite nice ensemble, but really we've only got a saxophone and a piano at the moment.” To take on 11,000 boilers a year, they’ll need a full line-up.
Partnerships with industrial giants are on the horizon, giving credibility and distribution muscle. The prize is huge: swap out every new boiler for their heat pump, and suddenly the goal of eliminating 10 per cent of global emissions is within reach.
Hot Green Solutions is betting that once the economics line up, even the most conservative factories will embrace change.
More on careers and the company’s plans can be found on Hot Green Solutions’ LinkedIn and soon at hotgreensolutions.com