Newcastle-based Climate Tech Startup selected for International Impact Accelerator
Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK - 25th March 2025 - North East tech startup Krellian has been selected to participate in the Sage Impact Entrepreneurship Programme by Village Capital to help scale their smart building solution.
Krellian helps facilities managers of commercial buildings to meet their net zero targets whilst saving money, by optimising space utilisation and reducing energy consumption using smart building technology.
Krellian Hub is a first of its kind commercial smart building hub which consolidates multi-vendor building management systems into a single standardised interface using the Web of Things. Data from the hub can then be streamed in real time to the Krellian Cloud service, which creates a digital twin of a building to model how it is being used and help identify potential optimisations.
After validating their business idea through the Ignite Pre-accelerator, Krellian has built its smart building solution with the help of £75k in Innovate UK grants and a strategic partnership with Canonical.
The fledgling startup has now been selected from over 200 applicants to join the first European cohort of the international Sage Impact Entrepreneurship Programme. Through this programme Krellian will receive tailored mentoring, support, training and a $10k milestone grant before going on to compete in a peer selected process for a further $50k in grant capital at the Program Summit in Atlanta, GA, US.
The programme is a part of a three year initiative sponsored by the Sage Foundation to support 165 entrepreneurs across the UK, France, Southern Europe and the US who are making a positive environmental, social, and economic impact.
Krellian Founder Ben Francis says:
"After eight years of working on mobile and smart home technology at Mozilla I became a dad, and decided I wanted to apply everything I’d learnt to helping solve the climate crisis. I founded Krellian to use smart building technology to make our built environment smarter, safer and more sustainable. We’ve already done a lot of hard work to validate that we’re solving a problem that people really care about, and build our first solution. This programme will help us get that product to market, plan for scale, and ready the business for further investment."
Krellian is a UK limited company incorporated by Ben Francis in 2020 with a mission to make our built environment smarter, safer and more sustainable. Krellian has previously won grant funding from the Ignite Pre-Accelerator, Sunderland IoT Accelerator and Innovate UK.
Village Capital is a non-profit impact accelerator with a mission to unlock early-stage social and financial capital for entrepreneurs building emergent solutions for environmental, social, and economic challenges. Since incorporating as a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization in 2010 they have supported over 1,600 startups around the world through a unique peer-selected investment approach.
Sage Foundation is part of The Sage Group plc, and helps disadvantaged communities across the 23 countries they operate in. It supports tens of thousands of people in local communities through more than 1,000 charities, providing a global programme of social change philanthropy, transforming lives to support economic stability and social equality.
Ben Francis is a Software Engineer with over fifteen years of commercial experience ranging from UK startups to Silicon Valley based tech giants like Mozilla and Google. He has a Masters degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Birmingham, is a Member of the Institute of Engineering and Technology, and a W3C Invited Expert on Web Applications and the Web of Things.
Canonical is a UK-based privately held computer software company founded and funded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth to market commercial support and related services for Ubuntu® and related projects. Canonical employs staff in more than 30 countries and maintains offices in London, Austin, Boston, Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei, Tokyo and the Isle of Man.
Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, is the UK’s innovation agency. Innovate UK’s mission is to help companies to grow through their development and commercialisation of new products, processes and services, supported by an outstanding innovation ecosystem that is agile, inclusive and easy to navigate.
Contact: press@krellian.com