Name: Sycous
Based: Leeds
Website: www.sycous.com
We founded Sycous in 2014 with the aim of disrupting the district heating market to make it fairer, cheaper and more sustainable for consumers.
District heating is a technology aimed at reducing energy usage in densely populated areas by converting raw fuel to heat on a large scale. So, rather than 100 properties having 100 boilers, they all share one boiler.
This is great in principle but consumers are often ripped off by having to pay huge standing charges, or by getting charged for energy they don’t even use!
We wanted to crack open the district heating market to deliver what district heating should be: fair, sustainable and cheap.
We developed MySycous – a cloud-based system that allows anyone with an internet connection to administer and bill district heating consumers with ease.
But being a small fish in a big pond is hard. So we responded to a funding call by the Department for Energy and Climate Change. We were up against the big fish and competition was stiff. But our aims, values and ambitions were what got us through. In January 2015, just six months into trading, our name appeared in a government press release alongside names like E.ON, Cofely and the University of Warwick.
It’s a first step, but a great one. We’ve seen a massive increase in inquiries, we’re building new collaborative partnerships and we’ve been invited to showcase our solution.
Matthew Hall is the director of Sycous
