⁠Bryan Charter⁠ is co-founder and CEO of Bristol based ⁠SuSy House⁠.

In this episode Bryan discusses the mission - to make homes more energy-efficient and sustainable. Susy is a mobile app that helps homeowners assess the energy efficiency of their properties, connect with contractors, and access financing options for upgrades. The app uses data science and smart technology to provide personalised recommendations and estimate potential savings.

"Innovation is all about making things faster, easier, cheaper."

"Proper digital passports for homes would be a game-changer."

"Finding engaged angels is a good place to start for funding."

Takeaways

• SuSy is a mobile app that helps homeowners identify energy-saving upgrades for their homes, connect with local contractors, and access financing options.

• The goal is to eliminate barriers and make the process of improving home efficiency easier and more accessible.

• Digital passports for homes, which provide detailed information about a property's energy usage and efficiency, would be a game-changer in driving the adoption of energy-saving upgrades.

• Funding for tech-for-impact companies, especially in the sustainability and retrofit space, can be challenging, but finding engaged angels and aligned funds is key to success.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Tech for Good South West podcast

00:58 Introducing Brian Charter and Suzy

02:21 Identifying the Challenge and the Solution

04:09 How Suzy Works

08:22 The Importance of Digital Passports for Homes

16:57 Funding Challenges for Suzy

20:49 Driving Change in the Sustainability Landscape

25:36 Why Suzy is Based in the South West

27:57 What's Next for Suzy

28:54 Open to Funding Opportunities

29:19 Closing Remarks

Transcript

Tech4Good South West (00:02.894)

Welcome to the Tech for Good South West podcast brought to you by Annie, Alicia and Ariel. Tech for Good South West has relaunched and we're on a mission to build momentum for the Tech for Good movement across the South West. Our podcast focuses on conversations with charities, investors, startups and initiatives to share their stories, challenges and successes.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome back. It's Alicia here from the Tech for Good Southwest podcast. And today I'm joined by Brian Charter, which is quite a, it's a solid name, Brian, actually. Brian Charter. Brian is founder and CEO of SuSy. And yeah, I'm so excited to dig into the story of SuSy, a little bit about Brian's background about the Southwest and obviously everything Tech for Good.

I'm sure a lot of people are thinking what's SuSy Brian. So let's just kick off and say, who are you? and what's SuSy?

Thanks, Alicia. Well, thanks so much for having me on here. Delighted to take part in the podcast. so who am I? so, very brief background. I spent the first 10 years of my working life, mobilizing business units that did refurbishments and decent homes upgrades for social housing, local authorities, that kind of thing. So that large quantities of housing stock before moving into supporting the growth of retail maintenance company and then establishing my own growth consultancy.

During that time, I met my co founder of SuSy, Marrow, who has a background in smart buildings. And we were talking about kind of legacy, you know, I've got kids now I was thinking about how could I use what I know and what I've learned over the first 20 years of my career to have a positive impact? And he had a real focus on technology and sustainability as well. And we were thinking, obviously, what's the big crisis of our time? It's the environment. And what do I know? I know housing. And housing is the source of 20 % of our CO2 emissions.

Tech4Good South West (02:21.678)

A lot of people don't know that because it actually depends on how you see it, the second or third biggest emitter behind transport and energy production and everyone like housing is something that's very personal to everybody. And there are really good things that we can do with our houses. But there is a huge challenge to making our houses more efficient. And we essentially identified, you know, innovation is all about making things, eliminating barriers, making things faster, easier, cheaper.

And the big challenge with people not sort of really focusing on making houses more efficient or doing a lot of work to make their houses more efficient came in three ways. One, because actually it's not like getting a new kitchen or bathroom. People aren't quite sure what to do. What's going to give them the biggest return for their investment. Like what's appropriate for their specific house.

Then they're not sure actually who's got the skills to do it, who are people that they can trust to carry out work, et cetera. And three, actually, how are you going to fund it? Particularly if it's not yet widely recognized. So are you going to get the return on your investment? Are you going to make the saving that you want to make? All these questions. And so, you know, everybody's lives are super busy. Everyone's got their own stuff going on. They've got a lot of stress just trying to hold down jobs and family and whatever it might be.

So as soon as you encounter friction, you might, you know, a lot of people out there have got good intentions and they may recognize, yeah, my house could be more efficient. As soon as you encounter friction and anything, it's like, this is too hard. So, SuSy got going basically on that basis. We wanted someone to be able to get a huge energy bill through the door, go Googling on their phone or on their laptop, find our app and go from that point all the way through to being able to take action, eliminating all of those barriers every step of the way. That was the ethos behind why we got going.

Wow. Just a question. I don't know whether you know this, but do you know what like one single item in the household is like the main drain on electricity or whether it's, yeah. Do you know what it is? I'm just really curious for mine. Cause so I could go and turn it off. Yeah. What was the most energy and efficient?

Tech4Good South West (04:38.702)

Obviously things like tumble dryers and kettles use a huge amount of electricity, only when you're using them. There's a lot of things that just sit on standby that are just gradually ticking away and draining your electricity, whether that be kind of TVs and, you know, screens and monitors. Those are the things that tend to sit there gradually ticking away. But obviously anything that's producing heat is is a, is a big draw on electricity.

In terms of SuSy then is it a mobile app? How, how does it, how's it actually work?

So essentially, it's a mobile app. We're currently also developing the web sort of platform version for it as well. The benefit of hindsight and, you know, as, as you grow businesses, you make mistakes and realize actually, probably for something like this, we would have done well to start with a web portal. We started with an app because we thought everyone sort of on their phone and doing different things. And essentially what you could do is you can download the app, you identify your property on Google Earth. And we immediately pull a whole bunch of public data sets about that property. So we're looking, we're starting with the EPC. So now maybe more or less up to date, we've, we've cleansed the EPC database so that we've got more sort of accurate inputs than maybe is purely on your EPC report.

Then we add other data sets like incident sunlight, geolocation, average temperature, et cetera. And we can also connect into your smart meter if you've got one. So we can start to understand energy usage profile. And we're using that to start to build a sort of digital profile of the property. What we then do is present that back to the user and say, what are these things? This is what we believe we know about your property. Update us. Tell us what's wrong. What have you changed since? Because sometimes the EPC essentially has done when the property is purchased or sold or rented out. If the last time that happened was many years ago, and then you've done a bunch of things to the property, then it's not likely to be fully up to date. And we're working all the time at the moment on how can we bring in more and more accurate data looking at, you know, mapping and that kind of thing. So you can assess what's been done to the property and ultimately our ethos is to get as absolutely as close as we can to giving you that accurate digital picture of your property.

Tech4Good South West (06:59.56)

What we can then do is use materials data science to apply upgrades to it, you know, better insulation, draft proofing, solar windows, heat pump, you know, just changing, changing the lights out for LEDs, if you haven't done that yet, all those elements and assess given your energy usage, given the number of people living in a property, etc. This is what we project would be your savings. And then we're also seeing evidence coming out now of the impact on property value. So in certain segments of the market, people are starting to look for more efficient properties, and they are commanding a more of a premium. And so we've seen reports come out from people like Right Move, Knight Frank, and that's exactly great for the argument of doing something for the property. Because one of the biggest barriers is people are going like the return on investment in terms of the payoff of doing some of these things, it does take number of years. And obviously, we've seen the return on investment.

One of the reasons that I think retrofit sort of really got going is partly 2050 sort of targets of net zero. And so the government is pushing it. But also, we had the the energy crisis and the energy price spike. And that has shortened the return on investment in terms of making improvements to the home and people are much more aware of their energy bills than they used to be.

but if we can get that argument going that says, actually, do you know what you capture the capital value in the property because people are recognizing this and so they pay more for that property. and then you making the savings straight away, then that really helps. So what it does is it gives you that assessment and then says, would you like to get some indicative, costs from contractors now, very conscious, having looked at other sorts of introductory type.

solutions out there for getting work done to the home that people don't necessarily like putting their details out into the ether and getting bombarded with lots of phone calls and emails. So what we did instead is the beauty of it is we know the property profile and we can then share the details of the property profile with local contractors who do the work that you've specified that you're interested in without actually sharing your personal details. That also saves the contractor time.

Tech4Good South West (09:20.206)

because they're able to see things. You can even take pictures of, you know, the property itself. They can see the sort of makeup of the property and then they can give an indicative estimate. It's not quote. It's not, you know, they're not holding to it, but a ballpark idea. And that helps them because it saves them time from going out because they're doing a lot of educating at the moment because people don't understand it and they don't know where to go in order to find out about this stuff. They're sort of calling up a solar panel installer, and then they're calling up an insulation expert and they're calling up a heat pump.

expert and they're getting them to come in and kind of educate them. So if we can take that burden away, do that within the app, that's good for the contractor. It also allows people to get a sense of what, what is this likely to cost me before they're then sharing their personal details. If they then they can then take that and go to the other side, which is finding finance, the government's put something together called the green homes, finance accelerator.

We're doing that in partnership with a company called Scroll Finance. So they are specifically bringing a financial product to support energy efficiency upgrades within the home. So we've brought that onto the app and we're looking to bring more and more banks and financial institutions are interested in bringing these kinds of products to market. So ultimately we want to have a suite of those on the app.

So people can choose what's most appropriate for them. They can kind of compare and contrast everything from I'm going to completely remortgage because maybe I'm doing a I'm doing this as part of a whole house extension and refurbishment anyway. But I know that some banks are now they've got green mortgages and they're essentially charging people a lower interest rate because the banks are now incentivized as well to have more efficient properties on their books or to decrease the numbers of inefficient properties that are within their mortgage portfolio.

So we want to have a suite of those. You can then go, right. Can I access some of those? Great. That matches with what I've been told that I'm going to need to sort of be spending on this. And then you can invite specific contractors that you want to looking at their kind of social proof to actually cross the threshold and come and give you a full quote. And that's, that's the process as it stands. What we are working on right now is sort of recognizing that given where the market's at, people aren't necessarily

Tech4Good South West (11:38.446)

comfortable to go straight from digital advice to doing something and working with contractors, etc. So there is a growing professional service of retrofit coordinators and surveyors and we are looking to bring them and involve them as well as architects who are specializing in the space to allow people to access those experts via the app as well.

to help them if they want a whole house plan, you know, rather than because we'll get as close as we absolutely can digitally, but it's never going to be perfect. And so having someone come out, who's an expert and look at your property and go, actually, you know, I can see that in particular there, your windows is just really poorly fitted. So part of your problem is that you're getting massive drafts there, et cetera. Like that's that, that is a helpful part of the process as well. So we want to help facilitate that.

Wow. I mean, it's, it's what tech for, my new thing is tech for impact rather than tech for good. But it's, yeah, it's what tech for impact is, is what you build and it's amazing. Just a question. What's your thought on, obviously new build homes. I mean, especially around Bristol now. I, like I've been out of Bristol for two years. I came back and the, yeah, the amount of new build houses. We all know that older houses are less energy efficient.

Do you think this is going to be something that new build developers and companies will just bring in a standard to make homes not anymore, and you efficient or maybe something using something like Susie as sort of a standard to set what the new bar is when it comes to sustainable housing. That's a bit of a roundabout question. I know what I'm trying to say there. And I'm sure you understand what I mean, but I'm just thinking about the difference between a new building.

and, and older houses and obviously how much more sustainable these new buildings are equally. It takes a lot to build them. I think that so the real area that we're, you know, it's important that we focus every business has to kind of have an area of focus because we can't solve the whole problem. in terms of the standard, the stat, ultimately the standards in building are always going to be set by essentially government regulation.

Tech4Good South West (14:04.526)

And the government has been gradually pushing regulation on new builds. I think where Susie fits within that is probably in terms of driving the quality of the existing housing stock. So if we can drive forward those upgrades that it makes, you know, existing housing stock perform as well, or even better than new build, then that will obviously sort of push new build to do really well.

It's, it's, I'm going to be honest, it's challenging. I was, I was speaking to someone from octopus energy the other day and I was talking to him about retrofit and they were saying, we think we can achieve zero bills from about 2015 onwards. it is challenging with older homes to achieve that kind of standard without really go, you know, the certain, certain interventions that are expensive and doing a full whole house retrofit can be, can be very pricey. so.

It's about working out for us. It's about helping people see where they'll get the biggest bang for their buck. Therefore sort of balancing that with the decarbonization of the grid, which people are working on. So, you know, we anticipate that a lot of homes that get upgraded are still, they're still going to need external energy sources. They will just need less of it. And it's about identifying, you know, where they can have the biggest impact to, to have more efficient homes. And I think

Crucially as well, more comfortable homes. So this is the one thing that as we've got more and more into this, you know, I've been thinking, I'm getting some work done on my house right now and we've got solid brick walls. And so we go, right, well, we're going to have to do internal or external wall insulation, which is messy. And well, if you do internal messy, if you do external, it can be quite pricey. However, the huge benefit of that is

like we're cold in the winter. Yeah. And actually, it's and I think for years and years, we've been sitting in this country going everyone sitting with like blankets on their knees and, you know, pumping up the heating, but you get hotspots and cold spots and everyone sits by the radiator and, you know, wouldn't it be nice to actually live in homes that had a consistent temperature because you heated them up and then they retain their heat. Yeah. So so there's there's multiple benefits to it. Definitely.

Tech4Good South West (16:27.886)

Do you mind if we talk about sort of Susie's sort of funding, just because let's be honest, funding has been really tricky the last sort of 12 months. All you're seeing at the moment in terms of funding is AI companies getting billions and billions of pounds, still a lot of fintechs, getting a lot of investment. Don't get me wrong, green energy is a really hot space, but in terms of retrofit, in terms of sustainability, I still think, and especially like real tech for impact companies, I'm having more and more conversations where...

funding is more of a struggle and so for people that are listening who might be starting to go on a funding journey I'd love to just find out a little bit about yeah did you bootstrap or are you going through your series A at the moment what does funding for Suzy look like? Yeah so essentially we developed the concept for Suzy and then we went out looking for backers and back in 2022 we were very fortunate to come across a

company called Phoenix Sustainable Investments, who are very involved in the property space that was set up by someone called Carl Hick, who was a property entrepreneur. And he really liked what we were doing. And he's got a real heart and a passion for driving, you know, sustainable technologies. So that's where we got our original investment. And then we were fortunate enough, this is a space that the government is interested in. And so we're fortunate enough to identify a few key pots of grant funding.

And so we succeeded in getting a couple of government grants. The challenge with government grants is you have to have the cash to spend upfront in order to be able to then like recoup it essentially. So we needed more investment. And so we've been sort of gradually raising a kind of seed round investment really. So we've raised from some angels and we've been, but it has been a challenge. We've been

talking to a number of funds for months and lots of people that are very interested. We've been coming across either, it's, it's a bit close to something else that we've already invested in, or it's just not a space that we're investing in or people are concerned with a sort of software play. How defensible is it? so where does the IP sit and is it about a kind of fastest mover to market, et cetera? having said all that we have recently, and I won't say who they are right now, but

Tech4Good South West (18:54.51)

We are in the process of getting into legal's with a, particularly a property focused fund, which is very exciting. We also have had some interest from an energy company recently, but I think, you know, talking to others in this space, depending on how far along you are, I would say finding some engaged angels is a good place to start people who care.

about the space and who are passionate about it, particularly because you've got some really good tax incentives, SEIS and EIS for that early stage. And then, yeah, really just speaking to aligned funds. And that's the thing. I think, you know, we spent a lot of time almost peppering all sorts of funds. And I think this is a mistake that a lot of people probably do make when they first go out fundraising as well.

really focus your energies on building relationships and finding ways in because a lot of funds as well they have cycles of investment and it's kind of so they might see it as really aligned but they're we're not you know we're not investing right now or we're so timing is important. Awesome, in terms of change that you talked a little bit about legacy and obviously we've spoke quite a lot about

what changes need to be made. But in terms of you personally, and also maybe for the company, what change would you like to see? And then what do we need to do? And it could be one main thing, but what do we need to do to get there? In terms of kind of wider change in the landscape? Change? Yeah, change, whether that's within sustainability, whether it's in housing, whether it's in, I mean, less than we're not going to get political here. But yeah, what

like that one thing that you'd really like to see change. So I think that something that would have a huge impact on this sector and on the industry would be proper digital passports for homes. And in order for that to happen, we need to continue driving the installation of smart meters, which actually a lot of people malign the kind of smart meters and all houses don't have smart meters, but actually

Tech4Good South West (21:16.206)

We're not doing too badly on that. And we had, you know, we had a lot installed when I was looking at the, reports, sort of first quarter of last year. So doing quite well, but yeah, a proper digital passport that shows genuinely when you're going to buy a house, someone should produce a report that doesn't just say, this has got this, this and this, and therefore it's EPC. Whatever it needs to be more detailed than that. It needs to show, well, actually this property with this many people in it has used this much energy in the last year and and being kept up to date so when significant things are changed that is kept up to date and Data is kind of key to that. I think then people can go in with their eyes wide open because what we need is you need buyers because it's a commercial solution particularly for the privately owned homes, you've got to convince people to put their hands in their pocket and invest in making their properties more efficient.

The government's going to fund some of it and they do bring grants particularly to lower income households but they're not going to fund all of it and they can't afford to. We're talking about estimates from 150 billion to a trillion pounds to do the work that we need to do. They're not going to fund all of it so we've got to see where the benefit is and to be able to make that argument as well.

So landlords, privately owned rental properties are about 4 million of our 27 million housing stock. Landlords need to find a way that they can recoup the value if they're going to invest that. If they could show the digital passport for that property that I've now done all this work to and therefore I am going to charge slightly higher rent, but you'll have lower bills. Maybe there's a balance so people can choose and say, okay, well, that that's great because actually, I'm going to live in a more efficient home that I'll feel better about in terms of its contribution to CO2. But also, actually, it's more comfortable. It's a nicer place to live. The nice thing about having a well insulated home is it's also tends to be a quieter home. There's add on benefits as well as being warm, etc. So having those passports, and again, people

Tech4Good South West (23:38.862)

as they go around, they'll vote with their wallets and go, well, actually this is, this has been proven to be a much better performing home. so I'm happy to pay the extra, you know, 5 % for it because I know that it's going to be a better place to live in a cheaper place. so that will then get more people doing it because why not invest is it's like the argument of, you know, when you think we're going to be here the next five years, should we extend our borrowing right now to upgrade the kitchen or not? Well, we'll probably get that value back when we sell it and we get the benefit of it right now. Same thing with a more comfortable, more efficient property. So I think profit, digital passports for properties would be a good thing.

Awesome. Sounds so cool. And I love my smart meter by the way. I'm absolutely obsessed. And I go around switching things off and I'm like that's the difference. Y

One thing I always wanted to build into the app actually, which we haven't got to yet was like a dadometer or mumometer that alerts you when there's a sudden spike in energy. So you can go around and go, I want to turn everything off. One thing we're nightmare for is leaving the computer screens on and laptops plugged in, like just working from home for a couple of days. Just close it, lock the screen and walk off. I'm like all the time, no, we need to turn everything off.

Obviously SuSy is a Southwest based business, but why the Southwest?

To be honest, it was a bit serendipitous. So most of my other co -founders are based in Bristol. and Bristol is just a city where people really care about the environment like it's, you know, it's got an identity of driving things forward. I don't know if you're familiar with Bristol City Leap, who we're now working in partnership with on one of the bits of software that we're developing, which is more targeted towards local authorities and housing associations helping them deliver social housing decarbonisation fund and home upgrade grant retrofit work, obviously.

Tech4Good South West (26:03.406)

they've got the target of making Bristol and Net Zero city by 2030. So it's a great place to be in terms of the kind of political drive behind achieving Net Zero. So great for us to be there. And also it's more it's not a massive city. So you can get to know people in the space in the sector. And there's lots of people, energy around it. It's very vibrant. So yeah, it's a great place to be.

Awesome. So what's next for SuSy? Well we've just launched a home value calculator in partnership with a local estate agent, and we're looking to roll that out more widely. And that is kind of as a way we're always looking for ways to pull leads towards SusSy and make people more aware of us. So we're looking at all sorts of different routes to market so that the public awareness of the fact that we exist can become much wider. And as I said, we're looking at introducing additional services like the surveying services, et cetera, to really help facilitate that process for people even more easily. so yeah, I think it's just kind of keep pushing. There's so many strands to it and it's, it's a complex business model. So we're excited about this.

As I said, this fundraise that I think we may have got on that is also involved in accelerator program. That's very involved with a number of different property organisations. So that could help us scale both nationally and potentially internationally. So there's loads of opportunities. there's not one thing that's next. It's kind of like what's next in 10 minutes and then what we do.

Where did, where did the name come from?

It's so Maro, my co founder had a company called Sustainable, sustainable systems - he called it Susie research limited, which comes out of sustainable systems. So the company name is actually sustainable systems limited.

Right. Cool. But it's S -U -S -Y. Amazing. Well, look, it's fascinating.

Tech4Good South West (28:27.182)

Fingers crossed to complete your fundraise, but are you open to any angels getting in touch off the back of this podcast?

Absolutely. A hundred percent this doesn't actually complete our fundraise. It sort of gets us a chunk of what we need and it looks like that will come in probably in the form of an ASA. So yeah, we're still looking to raise as well for everything that we want to do. I'd be delighted to speak to any angels who are listening and would like to get in touch.

Awesome. And can they get in touch for you on LinkedIn? I'll share the email when we share the podcast. But yeah, happy for people to get in touch directly.

Absolutely. Amazing. Well, Brian, thank you. I think what you're doing is fascinating. Thank you for choosing to do this in the South West. Like you said, I think there's just a real commitment for this and I'm so excited to follow the journey and I'm sure a lot of people will be in touch after this and just dig into how they can help and also to follow the journey. So thank you for speaking to me today and yeah, thanks guys.

Thanks Alisha, thanks for having us on, really appreciate it.