Unreasonable Impact UK and Europe 2024

Unreasonable Impact is an international network focused on scaling socially impactful solutions that will help build a more inclusive economy and create a cleaner future.

It is an innovative multi-geographic partnership between Barclays and Unreasonable to support high growth ventures at the forefront of mission-driven innovation. Since 2016, Unreasonable Impact has met participating entrepreneurs at a pivotal stage of their growth journey with the resources, mentorship, and global network needed to help them rapidly scale, create jobs, and address key global issues.

Unreasonable and Barclays are proud to showcase the 12 entrepreneurs that have been identified as drivers of social and environmental change in the UK and Europe. These innovators are providing possible solutions to the future of food, manufacturing, renewable energy, and more. Together, they’ve raised more than US$415M in financing and operate in more than 20 countries.

Join us as we continue to support and amplify their transformative efforts, fostering a brighter, more sustainable tomorrow for us all.

Agricarbon

Bringing affordability, rigor, and scale to soil carbon quantification.

SECTOR

Sustainable Agriculture

HQ

Dundee, Scotland, UK

ENTREPRENEUR

Annie Leeson

TITLE

Co-Founder & CEO

Agricarbon is a soil carbon measurement company that samples agricultural soil and natural landscapes and measures their carbon content to verify carbon removals. Its carbon data serves as a vital foundation for a trusted and impactful carbon marketplace. Agricarbon supports farm carbon project developers building large-scale nature-based climate solutions as well as corporates decarbonising land-based production in their supply chain (Scope 3).

The company operates across Europe and is deploying its recent Series A toward further expansion in North America (first client projects already underway). Already, Agricarbon has recorded more than 4 million tonnes of organic carbon held in clients’ soils today (equivalent to >14.5 million tonnes of CO2), with a carbon removal potential of over 3,500,000 tonnes of CO2 by 2030.

Annie Leeson is a biochemist turned marketeer turned strategy consultant with 17 years developing innovation and decarbonisation strategies for global corporates and cities. She is also trained in corporate coaching, leadership, culture, workforce engagement and productivity, and co-founded the global data business, Leesman Index, in 2010 which exited in 2022.

Annie co-founded Agricarbon in 2020 and recently completed a Series A fundraise to accelerate international expansion and develop a data-led commercial platform for soil health monitoring; a journey greatly enriched by the vast network of talented, generous and galvanised peers in this industry.

Better Dairy

Building the future of food, starting with dairy.

SECTOR Food Technology

HQ

Greater London, England, UK

ENTREPRENEUR

Jevan Nagarajah

TITLE

Co-Founder & CEO

Better Dairy is a pioneering food tech company focused on revolutionising the dairy industry. Founded in 2020, the company leverages synthetic biology and yeast fermentation to produce milk proteins and constituents, mirroring traditional dairy production.

Today, Better Dairy is a team of more than 25 scientists, technologists, and food lovers with a vision to build a world where everyone can eat food that’s tastier, healthier, and more sustainable.

betterdairy.com

Jevan Nagarajah began his career in investment banking before making a transition into the tech industry. He has over 15 years of experience across stints at ICAP, HSBC, Rocket Internet, SumUp, Ritual.co and previously founding cloud kitchen start-up ShareDining, backed by JustEat.

Jevan is the Co-Founder & CEO of Better Dairy which he has been building for the last 4.5 years and which is leveraging precision fermentation to produce dairy products that taste and perform like traditional dairy but without needing any cows. Jevan holds a BSc Mathematics (First Class) from Imperial College London.

Chatterbox

Building a world enriched with the talent of marginalised professionals.

SECTOR

Educational Technology

HQ

London, England, UK

ENTREPRENEUR

Mursal Hedayat TITLE

Founder & CEO

Chatterbox is an online language learning platform designed to upskill global teams while helping displaced people or those out of the workforce re-integrate and earn a living. Its platform utilises marginalised professionals such as refugees or women returning to the workforce to deliver high-quality language tutoring in different foreign languages such as Arabic, Spanish, French and English, enabling tutors to demonstrate their full potential and connect their talent with demand from companies.

Chatterbox’s core proposition is linking the learner and the teacher through a language learning model while managing the ever-growing community of teachers. It is currently working with large multinational corporations and scaling its operations and product offering.

Mursal Hedayat MBE is the Founder & CEO of Chatterbox which works with corporate clients and has gained support from British and Silicon Valley investors. In 2018, Chatterbox won a ‘Next Billion’ Edtech Prize for high-impact innovative technology.

Mursal lives in the UK, having taken refuge from Afghanistan and studied at the University of Leeds. She is a multiaward-winning entrepreneur, awarded the Barclays Woman in the Community Award 2021, Forbes 30 under 30 and was awarded an MBE in 2021 in recognition of services to social enterprise, technology, and the economy.

SECTOR Agricultural Technology HQ

Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

ENTREPRENEUR

Max Gulde

Constellr

Constellr specialises in satellite data for agriculture and environmental monitoring. The company uses its proprietary satellite constellation that orbit the earth while collecting real-time temperature data that informs plant health, irrigation, and carbon cycles. These data points are then delivered to agriculture companies in a cloud-optimised format to improve agronomic advice to farmers, detect early signs of declining crop health, and improve water productivity.

The company operates across five continents and hopes to launch four satellites to be able to look at any given field on the globe once a day.

TITLE

Co-Founder & CEO

Max Gulde is a physicist with expertise in various scientific and technological fields, such as optics, nanotechnology, and planetary science. He has spent more than 10 years in academia, where he has been able to publish research in prestigious journals such as Science and Nature.

After finishing his postdoctoral work, Max explored the field of satellite technology. There, he became interested in the intersection of spacecraft technology and Earth Observation, which motivated him to co-found and lead Constellr, combining his interest in entrepreneurship and science to address some of the most urgent issues of our time.

ENOUGH

Making protein delicious, nutritious, and sustainable.

SECTOR Food Technology

HQ

Glasgow, Scotland, UK

ENTREPRENEUR

Jim Laird TITLE

ENOUGH is a food-tech ingredient company that passionately believes in fermentation as the most technologically and economically viable solution for sustainably feeding a growing global population. Its first manufacturing site in the Netherlands produces the equivalent of five cows’ worth of protein every hour, with a footprint to grow to make over 60k tonnes per year by the end of this decade.

ENOUGH’s product Abunda® mycoprotein is a solution for B2B customers to make great tasting foods without the unacceptable impacts of intensive animal farming.

ENOUGH’s growth plans, while ambitious, only account for a fraction of the forecasted global demand for new protein sources which are anticipated at 100 million tonnes within a decade. ENOUGH embraces any opportunity for collaboration to go further and faster.

enough-food.com

Jim Laird has worked in the food industry for 30 years, running frozen beef and chicken factories for Unilever in the nineties, managing the Quorn brand internationally in the noughties and becoming Co-Founder & CEO of ENOUGH (formerly 3F BIO) in 2015.

ENOUGH’s goal is to grow 1 million tonnes of high-quality protein in the next decade, commencing from their first site in the Netherlands which currently has capacity for 10k tonnes per annum. Achieving this requires collaboration across all parts of the value chain and ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’, as a team spanning three locations and 15+ nationalities ENOUGH is motivated by a collective purpose to make protein sustainable and “to do something where the impact is bigger than us”.

Land Life

Providing

SECTOR Nature Restoration

HQ

Amsterdam, Holland, Netherlands

ENTREPRENEUR

Rebekah Braswell

TITLE

CEO

Land Life was founded at the intersection of impact, science and technology, and for 10 years it has been on a mission to restore the world’s 2 billion hectares of degraded land. It gives companies the opportunity to invest in nature for the long run, making a difference that will echo for generations.

Land Life is involved in every step of the restoration process, from developing technology, finding land, partnering with locals and actually putting the trees in the ground. It focuses on building resilient ecosystems that benefit biodiversity, climate and local communities.

landlifecompany.com

Rebekah Braswell is an innovative and strategic leader with a holistic approach towards nature restoration. As founding member and CEO of Land Life, she works with international corporations, local and national governments, nonprofits and foundations to develop largescale, technology-driven reforestation projects that help mitigate climate change and restore vital ecosystems.

Prior to joining Land Life, Rebekah was an associate partner with Monitor Group and worked on issues of economic development and food security across Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Rwanda and Ghana. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MA from Oxford University.

Saving water and microplastics in everyday laundry.

Mimbly

Mimbly helps businesses with larger-scale laundry rooms, such as facility management and housing companies, to build sustainable laundry systems. This is accomplished with an add-on device that connects to professional laundry machines to reduce water and electricity consumption, thus reducing costs. Within this device, Mimbly has also built a first-of-a-kind product to filter and collect microplastics from synthetic textiles.

SECTOR

Waste Treatment Technology

HQ

Gothenburg,

Isabella Palmgren is the Co-Founder & CEO of Mimbly which she founded in 2017 after her studies in Biotech Engineering and Entrepreneurship & Business Design. After seeing the problems with water around the world, Isabella wanted to be part of a solution that saves water and prevents plastic pollution with new innovative products. Mimbly is based on the west coast of Sweden and is now live in four different markets.

In 2021, Isabella was recognised in Forbes 30 under 30 for social impact in Europe and this year she is a part of ‘Prins Daniels Fellowship,’ a community founded by His Royal Highness Prince Daniel of Sweden.

Nuada

Redefining carbon capture in hard to abate industries.

SECTOR Carbon Management HQ

Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK

ENTREPRENEUR

Conor Hamill TITLE

Co-Founder & Co-CEO

Nuada is the developer of an ultra-energy-efficient point carbon capture system intended to reduce carbon emissions from hard-to-abate industries to reach global net-zero targets.

The company has combined the unique characteristics of advanced materials with proven industrial technology to drastically lower the energy penalty related to point source carbon capture and remove the critical challenges to the mass adoption of carbon capture, utilisation, and storage (CCUS). This allows end-users in sectors like cement and steel to achieve net zero goals while reducing the effect on their bottom line.

nuadaco2.com

Dr. Conor Hamill is the Co-Founder & CoCEO of Nuada. Conor has rich experience in strategy, financing, and technology commercialisation and he is a recognised carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) expert and thought leader in the decarbonisation space.

Conor and his fellow Co-CEO, Jose, have orchestrated Nuada’s rapid growth, successfully leading the company in securing; a $10m Series A investment, several carbon capture projects and key partnerships with major cement producers. He is a PhD-trained chemical engineer and holds an eMBA.

SECTOR

Manufacturing and Supply Chain HQ

Greater London, England, UK

Qualis Flow

Qualis Flow (Qflow) is an AI powered platform that aims to enhance profitability and sustainability of construction; an industry that is responsible to 40% of global material consumption and 11% of global carbon emissions.

Tracking supply-chain cost, quality and carbon during construction is a real burden on project teams. Qflow makes this as simple as taking a photograph. Snap a picture of all material receipts and waste transfers as they come to site. Qflow then does the heavy lifting to digitise and analyse this data, flagging quality risks and calculating transport and embodied carbon in real-time. Qflow’s goal is to facilitate the transition to a circular economy in construction by helping companies better utilise existing materials, reducing waste and cutting carbon.

ENTREPRENEUR

Brittany Harris TITLE

Co-Founder

qualisflow.com

Brittany Harris is a civil engineer turned tech entrepreneur and founded Qualis Flow (Qflow) in 2018 on a mission to help construction teams build more efficiently and responsibly. By raising over $10m of venture funding she has grown the company to a 45 person strong team deploying Qflow across three continents.

Brittany is an Enterprise Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, member of the Institution of Civil Engineers, and guest lecturer at the University of Bristol.

Shellworks

Packaging that never becomes waste.

SECTOR Manufacturing and Supply Chain HQ

Greater London, England, UK

ENTREPRENEUR

Insiya Jafferjee

TITLE

Co-Founder & CEO

Shellworks produces a new generation of materials and packaging that are like plastic in performance but zero-waste wherever they end up. Shellworks wants to materialise a better future by eliminating plastic pollution.

The company produces a material called Vivomer, which is made by microbes in a fermentation process and naturally decomposes in a variety of end-of-life scenarios. Shellworks supplies the personal care industry today and plans to move into larger markets. The company is continuously innovating new sustainable materials to address packaging challenges that cannot be addressed with traditional plastic packaging.

Insiya Jafferjee is Co-Founder & CEO of Shellworks. The company is building beautiful packaging solutions for the personal care industry that are petroleum-free, microplasticfree, shelf-stable and home-compostableall enabled by its proprietary innovative biotechnology process. At the end of its useful life, once disposed of, it will fully break down in any environment, leaving behind zero microplastics.

Originally from Sri Lanka, Insiya has previously worked for Apple and Ford and holds a B.Sc in Product Design from Stanford University and an M.A and Msc. from Royal College of Art and Imperial College.

Vertical Future

Creating green, sustainable vertical farms with the highest standards.

SECTOR Agricultural Technology HQ

Greater London, England, UK

ENTREPRENEUR

Jamie Burrows

TITLE

Founder & CEO

Vertical Future (VF) is a global vertical farming technology and data company, founded in 2016. The company designs, manufactures, and builds fully integrated, autonomous vertical farms that, once operational, become smarter over time through VF’s unique SaaS solution, DIANA. VF’s ultimate goal is to improve the health of people and planet, and this goes beyond food.

VF’s team of over 60 staff, split across engineering, software engineering, plant sciences, and operations, has worked on projects, builds, and research within food/retail, pharma, alternative proteins, reforestation, and carbon sequestration. As a Global Innovator in the World Economic Forum and many other organisations and initiatives, VF is globally-recognised as one of the leaders in controlledenvironment-agriculture technologies and research.

Jamie Burrows is the Founder & CEO of Vertical Future (VF). He has over 15 years of experience and before setting up VF, he worked in Life Sciences at EY, Deloitte, and the UK Department of Health. His experiences in health system improvement translated over to VF.

Jamie is also a graduate of the prestigious Leadership Enrichment and Development (LEAD) programme at the U.S. Air Force Academy and holds an Honorary Bachelor’s degree in Business Economics from Buckingham University and a Masters in Energy, Trade, and Finance from Cass Business School, London.

Winnow

Using AI-driven technology to reduce food waste in commercial kitchen.

SECTOR

Food Technology and Processing

HQ

Greater London, England, UK

ENTREPRENEUR

TITLE

Winnow is a technology company that provides the tools to help commercial kitchens measure and reduce their food waste. It employs AI-driven computer vision technology that automatically captures and calculates the amount of food waste, converting this to a commercial loss and providing actionable insights for chefs to make smarter decisions in sourcing and menu choices.

Winnow reduces food waste by over 50% and is deployed in 2,600 kitchens today with clients including IKEA, ISS, Compass Group, Hilton, Accor, Carnival Group, and Sands Corporation. These clients are saving a combined $60 million per annum in food costs through reduced food waste. Winnow’s ambition is to save the industry $1 billion per annum by the end of the decade.

winnowsolutions.com

Marc Zornes was a former McKinsey consultant where he was a leader in the consumer and sustainability practices. While at McKinsey, Marc co-authored the McKinsey Global Institute report on Resource Revolution. In developing this report, his team highlighted food waste as one of the biggest issues globally, and yet very little was being done about it. Marc then left McKinsey to found Winnow to help the hospitality sector cut food waste using technology.

Since launch, Winnow has been deployed in 70 countries serving a wide range of clients.