S1 EP21 | Georgia Ware - Industrial Heat Decarbonisation

Key Learnings from Episode 21: Building and Scaling Industrial Heat Technology with Georgia Ware, Founder of HotGreen Solutions

In this episode, Georgia Ware, Founder and CEO of HotGreen Solutions, shares her journey into climate tech and the challenge of decarbonising industrial heat. She explores what it takes to build and scale a hard-tech business, from making low-carbon technology commercially viable and navigating complex supply chains to fundraising, building a specialist team and preparing for first deployment.

Tackling the Industrial Heat Challenge

Georgia began her career as a manufacturing engineer before moving into management consulting, where she spent close to a decade working with senior business leaders. A move into climate technology eventually brought her back to engineering and introduced her to industrial heat.

Despite her manufacturing background, it was an area she had previously given little thought to. Yet industrial heating accounts for around a fifth of global emissions, while receiving comparatively less attention than areas such as transport, renewables and batteries. LinkedIn

HotGreen focuses on generating lower-carbon industrial heat, particularly for applications such as food and beverage manufacturing. From brewing beer to processing dairy products and pharmaceuticals, many everyday goods rely on industrial heating processes that still depend heavily on fossil fuels. Pasted text

Key Takeaways

• Industrial heat represents a significant but comparatively overlooked decarbonisation challenge.

• HotGreen is focused on heat generation for industrial processes, particularly within food and beverage and fast-moving consumer goods.

• Replacing individual industrial boilers can deliver substantial emissions reductions because of the scale of energy used at each facility.

Decarbonisation Has to Make Commercial Sense

One of Georgia’s strongest observations is that carbon reduction alone is not necessarily enough to persuade manufacturers to replace equipment that already works.

Gas boilers have historically been reliable, affordable and capable of delivering the temperatures industrial processes require. While sustainability targets and volatile fossil fuel prices are creating pressure for change, manufacturers still have to justify significant capital expenditure.

HotGreen is therefore approaching industrial decarbonisation as both an environmental and commercial problem. Its aim is to develop technology that can compete with existing boilers on affordability, reliability and operational suitability, rather than relying on businesses being willing to pay a premium to reduce carbon. HotGreen Solutions

Georgia recalled being challenged by a customer because she had spent so much time discussing cost, convenience and energy security that she had barely mentioned carbon.

The irony was not lost on her. Carbon is the reason HotGreen exists, but making the economics work is what can enable widespread adoption.

Key Takeaways

• Sustainability alone may not provide a strong enough business case for replacing existing industrial equipment.

• Climate technology has to compete on commercial factors including cost, reliability and operational performance.

• Making decarbonisation profitable could help accelerate adoption beyond businesses already committed to ambitious carbon targets.

Building Hardware Means Playing by a Different Rule Book

The realities of building industrial hardware are very different from building software.

HotGreen’s heat pumps contain more than a thousand parts, supported by a growing network of contract manufacturers, component suppliers and material suppliers. If one critical component is unavailable or does not perform as expected, the entire system can be affected. Pasted text

The consequences of delays are different too. A software problem might be fixed and redeployed relatively quickly. With industrial equipment, replacing a component could mean waiting weeks or, in a worst-case scenario, months.

Georgia believes this complexity also creates defensibility. Competitors cannot reproduce years of supply-chain development, engineering knowledge and manufacturing experience overnight.

Key Takeaways

• Industrial hardware requires considerably more capital, supply-chain coordination and physical infrastructure than software.

• A single component can affect an entire system, making delays and technical problems harder to resolve quickly.

• The difficulty of developing the technology can ultimately become part of the company’s competitive moat.

Moving Fast Without Breaking Things

Startup culture often celebrates moving quickly, but Georgia argues that the familiar technology mantra of “move fast and break things” does not translate neatly into industrial hardware.

HotGreen works with flammable materials, high pressures and tightly regulated systems. A mistake in this environment has very different consequences from a software bug.

Safety therefore has to remain fundamental while the company still finds ways to operate at startup speed.

For Georgia, the challenge is not choosing between speed and caution. It is learning how to move quickly while maintaining the engineering discipline, regulatory compliance and care that physical infrastructure demands. Pasted text

Key Takeaways

• Startup principles developed around software cannot always be applied directly to industrial hardware.

• Safety and regulatory requirements place important constraints on how quickly physical technology can be developed.

• Hard-tech businesses still need speed, but that speed has to sit alongside engineering rigour and caution.

Fundraising Enables the Technology Journey

HotGreen raised a £1.2 million pre-seed round in 2025, followed by an acceleration round. For a company developing expensive industrial hardware, external investment is not simply about accelerating growth. It makes the technology development itself possible. Empirical Ventures

Georgia explained that individual systems can cost around half a million pounds to build. Investors therefore need to understand that hard-tech development follows a longer and more capital-intensive path before a company can manufacture systems repeatedly and ultimately become profitable.

The funding also allowed HotGreen to mature more quickly as an organisation and improve what it could deliver to customers.

Interestingly, Georgia did not experience the raise as a clean dividing line between one stage of the company and another. Recruitment and commercial activity had already begun before the funding formally closed, meaning one phase naturally overlapped with the next.

Key Takeaways

• Capital is fundamental to developing and deploying expensive industrial hardware.

• Hard-tech investors need to understand longer technology development timelines.

• Fundraising stages do not necessarily create neat boundaries between different phases of company growth.

The Responsibility Changes When You Start Building a Team

The pressure Georgia felt after raising investment did not primarily come from investors. It came from becoming an employer.

Moving from a small founding team to hiring people creates a different kind of responsibility. New employees are choosing to invest part of their careers in the company’s vision, and founders suddenly have salaries, opportunities and professional development to think about alongside the technology and commercial strategy.

Georgia described this as a significant shift in leadership. Previously, leadership had largely meant setting the direction and building the vision. Once people joined the company, it also meant creating an environment in which they could succeed.

Key Takeaways

• Hiring transforms the founder’s responsibility from leading an idea to leading people.

• The pressure associated with funding can come from employees as much as investors.

• Building a company means creating opportunities for the people who choose to join the journey.

Fundraising Can Become a Founder’s Full-Time Job

Raising investment is enormously time-intensive, regardless of whether a fundraising process is going well or badly.

Georgia found that the founder remains central to the process, particularly during the early stages of a business. Every hour spent speaking with investors, however, is an hour that cannot be spent with customers or working elsewhere in the company.

One approach that has helped HotGreen is a clear division of responsibility between Georgia and her co-founder, Andrew Anderson. Andrew leads from the engineering perspective, while Georgia focuses on the commercial and investor side.

That division requires trust. Georgia acknowledges that sometimes both founders could improve an individual meeting by attending it together, but the marginal improvement may not justify using an additional hour of scarce founder time.

Key Takeaways

• Fundraising consumes significant founder time even when investor interest is strong.

• Clear ownership between co-founders can allow a small leadership team to achieve more.

• Dividing responsibilities effectively sometimes means accepting that an individual task will not be optimised in isolation.

Becoming the “Chief Everything Officer”

One of the biggest surprises for Georgia was not technical at all. It was the sheer amount of administration involved in creating a business.

Legal contracts, payroll, insurance, recruitment, share options, premises and business rates all require attention alongside developing the product and serving customers.

Georgia compares the experience to “adulting”. Just as people eventually discover all the hidden costs and responsibilities associated with running their own lives, founders suddenly discover the infrastructure that established businesses quietly provide around their employees.

She initially called the resulting founder role the “Chief Everything Officer”, before Alex offered a slightly more colourful variation during the conversation.

Much of this work cannot simply be delegated. In some cases, Georgia is legally responsible for the decisions or documents involved, making trusted advisers, suppliers and founder networks particularly valuable.

Key Takeaways

• Founders can underestimate the operational infrastructure required simply to run a company.

• Legal, financial, HR and administrative costs need to be considered alongside salaries and technology development.

• Trusted advisers and founder networks can become an important source of support during the early stages.

Preparing for the First Deployment

At the time of the conversation, HotGreen was working towards its first deployment and had moved firmly into the build phase.

That means detailed planning around what is being manufactured, how components are assembled and which subcontractors are responsible for each element. Alongside the physical build sits another equally important process: proving that the system is safe and performs as expected. Pasted text

Georgia describes startup problem-solving as a form of “whack-a-mole”. One day the concern might be regulation. Once that is resolved, attention moves to suppliers, contracts, insurance or another technical issue.

Rather than facing a small number of enormous obstacles, the reality has been a constant stream of smaller first-of-a-kind challenges that all have to come together successfully.

Key Takeaways

• First deployment requires technical, manufacturing, regulatory and commercial work to progress together.

• Hard-tech scaling involves solving multiple first-of-a-kind problems simultaneously.

• Execution often consists of overcoming many smaller obstacles rather than one defining challenge.

Hiring for Skills, Culture and Stage

HotGreen is already thinking well beyond its immediate hiring needs. Georgia describes her approach as planning roughly two raises ahead, maintaining a working hypothesis about the future organisation while remaining willing to change it as the company develops. Pasted text

Hiring specialist engineers creates an additional challenge because some required skill sets are extremely specific. That reduces the choice available and makes finding both technical capability and cultural alignment harder.

Culture becomes particularly important when a team is operating under pressure. Georgia wants people to be able to speak candidly about what is working and what is not, while “pointing at problems, not people”.

HotGreen has recruited through a mixture of events, direct approaches and more conventional recruitment routes. The company is also nurturing relationships with strong candidates who may not be right for the business today but could be a better fit at a later stage.

A person who thrives in a 30-person scale-up may not enjoy joining a four-person startup, and vice versa.

Key Takeaways

• Hiring plans need to look beyond immediate vacancies towards the future shape of the organisation.

• Specialist technical skills and cultural alignment both matter, particularly in small teams operating under pressure.

• Candidate fit includes the stage of company someone is comfortable joining, not simply their skills and experience.

Leadership Has to Remain True to Your Values

One of Georgia’s most significant leadership lessons came from an earlier startup experience.

She once followed advice from someone more experienced even though the recommended approach did not sit comfortably with her own values. The relationship ultimately proved unsuccessful, leaving her regretting both the outcome and the fact that she had ignored her instincts.

She now takes a different approach.

Advice still matters, but ultimately she wants the decisions she makes as a founder to remain consistent with how she wants to lead. When your name is attached to the company and you are accountable for its decisions, success achieved by acting against your own values can carry its own cost.

Key Takeaways

• Experienced advisers can provide valuable guidance, but founders remain responsible for the decisions they make.

• Leadership decisions should remain consistent with the founder’s underlying values.

• Previous startup experience can provide important lessons for how a founder chooses to lead the next time around.

Looking Ahead

Georgia’s definition of success for HotGreen is refreshingly straightforward: multiple deployments with happy customers.

Each successful installation should reduce emissions year after year, but customer satisfaction matters just as much. The ambition is to reach a point where manufacturers are not only benefiting from the technology themselves but actively recommending it to others.

That would demonstrate something particularly important for industrial decarbonisation: lower-carbon technology does not have to succeed simply because it is greener. It can succeed because it is commercially compelling too.

Final Thought

HotGreen’s journey illustrates why building climate hardware requires a different kind of patience from many other startups.

The technology has to work. It has to be safe. The supply chain has to work. The economics have to stack up. Customers have to trust it, and investors have to understand why getting there takes time.

For Georgia, navigating those constraints is not separate from building the business. It is the business.