Heata
Utilizing the heat generated from cloud computing to warm water in households, thereby diminishing companies' carbon footprint and providing cost savings to individuals.
| Date | Investors | Amount | Round |
|---|---|---|---|
| - | investor investor investor | €0.0 | round |
* | £1.0m | Seed | |
| Total Funding | 000k | ||
Heata operates a distributed cloud computing network designed to address the dual challenges of data center energy consumption and fuel poverty. Founded in 2017 by Chris Jordan (CTO) and Michael Paisley (Head of Design), the company originated as an innovation project within British Gas. The initial concept, sparked by the significant energy usage of Bitcoin mining, involved using processing heat to help those struggling with energy costs. This idea evolved from a proof-of-concept with a Bitcoin miner heating a radiator to a more practical, year-round solution focused on domestic hot water cylinders and general-purpose computing.
The company's business model revolves around what it terms "Heat as a Service" (HaaS). Heata installs small, powerful compute servers, or 'heata units', in residential homes, attaching them to hot water cylinders. It then sells this distributed computing power to corporate clients for processing intensive, non-real-time batch workloads, such as 3D rendering, medical research, and financial modeling. The waste heat generated from this data processing is captured by a patented thermal transfer mechanism and used to heat the home's water, providing the resident with up to 4.8kWh of free hot water daily. Heata covers the electricity costs for running the unit, crediting the homeowner and potentially saving them up to £340 annually.
For its corporate clients, Heata offers a way to reduce the carbon footprint of their IT operations by eliminating the need for energy-intensive cooling systems typical of traditional data centers. The company's clients include firms with substantial cloud computing needs, like 3D animation and visualization studios. Heata has established partnerships with British Gas, which remains an investor, and cloud service provider Civo to run pilot programs and trials. A September 2023 seed funding round of £1 million, led by Mark Boost of Civo with participation from Green Angel Syndicate, is being used to expand the team and onboard new clients.
Keywords: distributed computing, waste heat recovery, sustainable computing, fuel poverty, edge computing, cleantech, green data center, cloud computing, social impact technology, Heat as a Service (HaaS), batch processing, data center efficiency, domestic water heating, 3D rendering compute, financial modeling computation, British Gas, Civo partnership, carbon footprint reduction, energy efficiency, patented thermal transfer