2024 was a record-breaking year for Nesta Impact Investments, building on our work since 2021 and developing an investment strategy around Nesta’s three missions:

• A sustainable future
• A healthy life
• A fairer start

The team invested in eight mission-aligned companies and supported a further four of our portfolio companies with follow-on capital, driving commercial growth alongside mission impact. We made these investments alongside a fantastic lineup of co-investors. At the end of 2024 we achieved an exit from Featurespace, an early investment we first made in 2010. Nesta has supported this AI leader in financial services from being a machine learning spinout from Cambridge University through to its sale to Visa Inc. 

We share here some emerging themes we’ve picked up over the past year.

To reach net zero in the UK, decarbonising homes is critical, but there remain too many hurdles, such as costs, delays and inconveniences, to convince people to switch to low-carbon heating options like heat pumps. We’ve backed two solutions to make retrofit easier for homeowners:

• Aira – offering affordable, sustainable and intelligent heat pumps providing clean energy for homes.
• Resi – a one-stop shop for home renovation, applying AI to make it quicker, cheaper and easier to design and build your home extension with low carbon options built-in.

For corporations and small businesses, the innovation we’ve backed is lowering cost and carbon emissions in their operations. We’ve backed:

• Anaphite – to reduce the cost and embodied carbon in battery manufacturing and energy storage.
• DEScycle – to reduce cost and minimise carbon intensity in the recycling of e-waste. DEScycle’s proprietary technology extracts metals, such as copper and gold, which are critical to decarbonisation, replacing existing high-energy intensity smelting processes. 
• Renewabl – to help corporates and small and medium enterprises verify their renewable energy sources quicker and more cheaply.

To help reach Nesta’s goal of halving obesity by 2030, we’ve backed innovators removing cost, calories and accelerating speed to market for healthier food alternatives:

• Nandi Proteins – a food science innovator that has developed ingredients that could significantly reduce the fat content of a typical sausage.

To tackle inequality in education attainment, we’ve seen technology enabling learning to be more tailored to individual students’ needs: 

• Gaia Learning – an online school serving neurodivergent students who need an alternative to the traditional classroom. AI and technology delivers content to children with ADHD and autism, enabling them to learn in ways that engage and interest them. 

Nesta has invested in early-stage technology for almost 20 years. We have seen firsthand the twists and turns of what it takes to support and scale up innovation. Our exit from AI fraud detection business Featurespace at the end of 2024 reaffirms our conviction that early-stage venture funding and patient capital are critical to a vibrant and growing economy.