This article is part of a series profiling the founders aligned with our Inclusive Alpha® investment approach.
In 2019, the UK became one of the world’s first major economies to draw up a legal target of reaching net zero by 2050. As a plan, it’s ambitious; it’s necessary; and it also makes good business sense: the green economy fuels growth.
A new report revealed that the net zero economy grew by 9% in 2023 and that the sector was responsible for 765,000 new jobs and £74bn-worth of goods and services. Given we are less than halfway to reaching net zero, there is plenty of room for further growth.
You’re probably thinking; this seems to be a good news story. Where’s the problem?
We’re behind. If you look at heat pump adoption for example, under 1% of UK households have a heat pump. Compare that to 14% of households in the US, and 80% in Japan.
We need to install far more infrastructure and ramp up its installation speed. This requires people. But there’s a massive shortage of people for roles fitting and maintaining solar panels, heat pumps, electric vehicle charge points and other types of vital green infrastructure. By 2030, globally, it’s estimated that we need 30 million more people to be upskilled for net zero infrastructure roles. In the UK, about three million people in construction, transport and energy are needed for new roles or reskilling. If we are going to fix Britain’s 28 million energy-leaky homes, for example, we will need an estimated 500,000 more people in green retrofit jobs.
There is a green skills emergency, but there is also an emergency in terms of skills more generally. This is also about a wider chronic shortage and contraction in the trade workforce. (The New Yorker wrote about this). Many tradespeople are nearing retirement, while fewer young people are entering the workforce due to demographic challenges and a drop in the appeal of those types of professions. In Europe, the number of trade workers has fallen by about 15% since 2000. It’s the same story in the US and UK.
What if we said the green skills emergency was actually an opportunity?
Co-founded by Richard Ng and Mat Ilic, climate ed-tech start-up Greenworkx is building the skilled trade workforce to deliver net-zero homes and roads.
When Greenworkx came to us as part of their pre-seed round we jumped at the opportunity to support them. What they do aligns seamlessly with our vision for Inclusive Alpha® and the conviction that social impact and financial return go hand in hand. Richard had been following our work here at Ada Ventures for a while and had noticed the relevance of the two theses of Fund II — climate equity and economic empowerment — to his new business. He also understood how Ada Ventures sees the portfolio. “We fit that mould of going after a really audacious, ambitious social mission but also having a really scalable approach in order to leave a massive impact on the world,” he says.
Since it was founded in June 2022, Greenworkx has grown significantly. They have over 7000 learners on their platform, through a mix of digital marketing and partnerships with schools, job centres and charities. Through Greenworkx, these learners can find out more about net zero jobs and opportunities for employment. “Net zero jobs are well paid, and really resilient and very secure because there’s going to be enormous demand for them,” says Richard. “This is a way for us to restore professional esteem to skilled trades.” So far, over 200 of their learners have completed a first formal qualification course, typically in retrofit.
The company has just signed its first enterprise deal with AgilityEco, a B Corp company that provides services supporting energy efficiency and retrofit into domestic properties in Britain. Greenworkx is working with them to build a route for 100 more home energy advisors to go into the industry.
Meet the (co)founder
Richard Ng is a type of founder that we look for here at Ada Ventures. He has a real drive to make a social impact coupled with the technical background to support it. His entire career has been in education and ed-tech. Once a maths teacher with the education charity Teach First, he moved into ed-tech and software engineering as a means to scaling up his impact, most notably as an early hire at Multiverse, the ed-tech unicorn.
He’s also taught at organisations like Coding Black Females and Code Your Future, which respectively support Black women and refugees into tech careers, saying: “I’ve always wanted to use my education and opportunities, which I’ve been lucky to have, to open doors for others.” And that’s where Greenworkx comes in. “Net-zero roles are accessible, meaningful and well-paid — making them amazing opportunities for millions both inside and outside the communities that I used to teach in,” he says. “I’ve always loved unlocking access and opportunity for others — and net zero is the means for doing that on a whole new scale.”
The idea for Greenworkx actually came from a chance meeting in June 2022 with his co-founder Mat Ilic. The two have hugely complementary backgrounds, with Mat bringing more of a policy and commercial background, including as a non-party political adviser to Prime Minister Theresa May in 10 Downing Street, in the government that legislated for the UK’s binding net-zero commitments. Mat has also previously worked on skills initiatives, both as Chief Development Officer at the national charity Catch-22 and also through running employability programmes from the Mayor of London’s office.
It started with a discussion about how the green workforce was massively underserved, particularly in comparison to tech. “This tech skills narrative of upskilling people for digital roles is now relatively mature and developed,” says Richard, referencing Multiverse, General Assembly and Codecademy. But there is not the same mobilisation in terms of net zero roles. “It’s a wide-open space, even though there’s a really serious existential edge,” he says. The climate crisis means it’s important to move quickly.
Richard’s interest in climate equity , and his role as a scout in the Ada Venture’s Scout programme, also led to him recommending Boldr, another start-up which joined our portfolio last year. It is an ambitious business supplying home-climate devices supported by an innovative energy-management platform.
The story so far
In April 2023, Greenworkx raised a £600k pre-seed round led by the European generalist fund Mangrove Capital Partners with participation from Ada Ventures and some hugely significant and relevant industry angels, including Euan Blair, founder of Multiverse; Fiona House, the CEO of Octopus Electric Vehicles; and George Chalmers, Head of Climate at Modern Ventures.
In Inclusive Alpha®, an inclusive lens is prioritised in every part of the investment process — from the investment team structure, to the investment strategy, to sourcing, selection and portfolio support. The team at Greenworkx really thinks along the same lines. “There’s something I’m really proud of,” says Richard. “In that round, just over half of our investor base comes from typically underrepresented backgrounds in the investment world.”
In the summer of 2023, building on this early momentum, Greenworkx completed a £880k pre-seed extension, led by PropTech1 Ventures, a German prop-tech fund, with further participation from Ada Ventures.
For this once-in-a-generation challenge and opportunity size, they’ve been intentionally building a team with deep expertise on executing at scale. Their fractional COO advisor, for example, was previously COO at Udemy, helping the ed-tech start-up scale to 190 countries. Their fractional Chief Product Officer advisor was a pioneer of online learning and Massive Open Online Courses; he was formerly founding Chief Product Officer at FutureLearn, building it from zero to one million learners.
What’s next?
Greenworkx is working hard to get new recruits — people who may have never considered a net zero role — into the industry. But the team has also seen that there is a huge demand from companies to upskill and retrain existing workforces to take on net zero roles. For example, as gas boilers are phased out, gas boiler engineers and customer support agents will need to be retrained. Greenworkx are working with companies to provide specialised upskilling for this transition. The shift from fossil fuels to renewables is a global issue that has been covered in the press.
And that’s why Greenworkx is on such an exciting journey. They have a global mission to get 10 million people into green jobs in 10 years to combat climate change. We want to help them reach their goal, secure the best returns for investors… and do our bit to save the planet on the way.
