Host: Stuart Hall, Managing Director, Sustainable Media Group
Guest: Robin Grenfell Cowan, High-Net-Worth Investor

Episode Overview

In the first episode of the Sustainable Times Investor Series, Stuart sits down with HNW investor Robin Grenfell Cowan to explore how early-stage investment decisions are really made in private markets. Robin has backed multiple pre-seed and seed-stage companies and brings a candid view on founders, deal flow, due diligence and sustainability-led innovation.

This episode focuses on what makes an opportunity stand out, what makes investors walk away, and how honesty, humility and long-term thinking shape investment outcomes.

• Why people matter more than anything

• Due diligence beyond the numbers

• The biggest red flags

• Pitch decks: what works and what doesn’t

• Why he doesn’t require revenue

• EIS/SEIS and the awareness gap

• Where the next wave of innovation will come from

• Advice for founders

This conversation cuts through the noise. It’s a grounded look at how investors actually think, something both founders and early-stage investors will find useful as the market resets for 2026.

“When you change who invests, you change what gets built.”

This week on Profit Meets Purpose Claire Tange, Co-Founder of Joanna Invests, discusses the community of female investors and founders she has built since 2022.

Claire saw the problem of gender inequality first-hand while working in both investment banking and startups. “We need to be smarter with our money,” she says. “Once we have it, we need to invest.” Even for willing investors, Claire says, deal flow is hard to access without an established network and harder still when focusing on female founders.

Since the first deal in 2022, into tech platform ‘We Are Eves', described as TripAdvisor for beauty products, Joanna Invests has backed ten female-founded companies across sustainability, fintech, health, and sport.

Joanna Invests has placed great emphasis on the value of community. Before investment, founders host webinars with potential investors. Afterwards, Joanna Invests arranges small “investor dinners” at the founders’ offices, where women meet the people behind the products they’re backing. “Those evenings are incredibly energising,” she says. “Women ask different questions; they're more interested in understanding how the business really works, not just what the numbers say”.

Ultimately, Claire wants Joanna Invests to complete the loop by funding female founders who later become investors themselves. “That’s the goal,” she says. “You invest in them, they build something successful, they exit and then they come back and invest in the next generation.”

Listen to the episode for the full conversation with Claire and learn how Joanna Invests is empowering a generation of female investors.

ST Website: www.sustainabletimes.co.uk

Joanna Invests Website: https://www.joannainvests.com/

Contact: [email protected]

"Resilience through intelligence."

On this week’s Profit Meets Purpose, Sustainable Times explores how artificial intelligence is reshaping business resilience. Daisy Moll speaks with Karan Chopra, Co-founder of Earthena AI, and Kevin Vranes, Chief Product Officer at Worldly, about how AI is helping companies manage risk, improve efficiency, and uncover opportunity in an age defined by climate uncertainty.

Founded in 2023, Earthena AI offers “decision intelligence for resilience,” an AI-reasoning engine that helps organisations turn complexity into action - translating data into insight and insight into strategy. Their partnership with Worldly, a leader in supply-chain intelligence, fuses global datasets with proprietary supplier data to identify risks, model returns, and surface investment opportunities with unprecedented precision.

For investors and founders alike, the conversation reveals how AI can accelerate transformation, from decarbonisation to supply-chain optimisation, turning sustainability from a compliance exercise into a driver of competitive advantage.

Chopra and Vranes also reflect on the responsibility that comes with innovation, and how intent, not technology, determines impact.

Website: www.sustainabletimes.co.uk

Earthena AI: https://www.earthena.ai/

Wordly: https://worldly.io/

Contact: [email protected]

“Imagine a Guinness X Gucci leather jacket!”

This week on Profit Meets Purpose, TJ Mitchell, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of ARDA Biomaterials, explains how they are turning beer waste into a scalable, plastic-free leather alternative.

After completing a PhD in supramolecular chemistry at Oxford, Mitchell joined the startup accelerator Entrepreneur First, where he met his co-founder Brett Cotten. 

Leveraging Mitchell’s chemistry expertise, ARDA transforms proteins from waste grain from breweries into a material as strong and flexible as leather that is bio-based and plastic-free.

From making two-litre samples in Mitchell’s kitchen to partnering with Beavertown Brewery on a limited run of cardholders, ARDA has scaled fast. The company raised £1.1m in seed funding led by Clean Growth Fund and secured an £800k Innovate UK grant, followed by a £4m round led by Oyster Bay, early investors in Oatly.

Now part of AB InBev’s 100+ Accelerator, ARDA is running a paid pilot using waste grain from major global beer brands. The company envisions decentralised facilities co-located with breweries, turning local waste into local materials.

Arda’s goal is to reach price parity with plastic leather, then undercut animal leather which would achieve circularity at industrial scale. “The first half of our process looks like a brewery, the second like a plastics plant,” he says. “That means we can scale fast without reinventing the system.”

Website: https://arda.bio/

ST Website: www.sustainabletimes.co.uk

Contact: [email protected]

“I call it the Cinderella of solar”

This week on Profit Meets Purpose, Daisy Moll sits down with Christophe Williams, Founder and CEO of Naked Energy, to explore why solar thermal is the forgotten Cinderella in the clean energy story…

Williams doesn’t come from the typical engineering mould. Before launching his clean tech venture, he led award-winning ad campaigns for Sony, Microsoft and BMW — even earning a Guinness World Record for a Toshiba commercial. But a chance conversation in 2009 opened his eyes to “the big heat problem” the fact that half the world’s energy goes into producing heat and led to the creation of Naked Energy.

Today, Naked Energy is redefining solar with Virtu, a hybrid technology that combines photovoltaic and thermal technology to generate both electricity and heat,  delivering up to four times the carbon savings of standard panels. With 24 patents, TÜV certification, and £30 million raised, the company has already completed more than 150 projects across 10 countries, from luxury hotels to the British Library and even Wimbledon.

But scaling clean tech isn’t just about engineering. Williams talks candidly about navigating the “valley of death” between innovation and mass adoption and why education, policy, and patient capital are key to unlocking solar heat’s potential.

He also shares how Naked Energy’s new software platforms, Clarity 24/7 and Clarity 360, are turning data into design, slashing project timelines and helping organisations that, as he puts it, “want to decarbonise but don’t know where to start.”

From the challenges of grid electrification to the opportunities of heat decarbonisation, this episode dives into what it takes to scale climate innovation and why Williams believes solar thermal is finally ready for its moment in the sun.

Website: www.sustainabletimes.co.uk

Naked Energy: https://nakedenergy.com/

Contact: [email protected]

“E-waste is the world’s fastest-growing waste stream.”

Entrepreneur Asad Hamir is tackling the growing e-waste crisis with his fourth venture Klyk, a circular IT company helping SMEs cut costs, extend the life of technology, and unlock the hidden value in discarded devices.

Asad explains how Klyk’s model replaces new purchases with refurbished ones, manages those assets in life, and then collects, repurposes, or donates them at end-of-life. This approach not only reduces waste but monetising every stage of a device’s lifecycle. With target customers among fast-growing SMEs, Klyk helps founders save money, stretch limited runways, and adopt IT that’s both affordable and sustainable. Their strength also lies in customer support, positioning themselves as an outsourced IT team for their clients.

Klyk’s growth comes at a time when right-to-repair laws and digital product passports are reshaping the tech industry, but Asad argues big manufacturers are still holding back true circularity by controlling parts and limiting accessibility. To counter this, Klyk has built out its IT services arm to reduce reliance on hardware sales and create sustainable recurring revenue.

Bootstrapped with £1 million of his own capital, Asad has kept operations lean and prioritising services over hardware margins. He shares lessons for both founders and investors: stay focused, build on your strengths, and recognise that circular models represent one of the most profitable opportunities in business today.

Klyk Website: https://helloklyk.com

Sustainable Times Website: www.sustainabletimes.co.uk 

Contact: [email protected]

Rise Awards: https://riseawards2025.awardstage.com/#!/home

On this week’s episode of Profit Meets Purpose, we are joined by Matthew Journee, CEO of Levistor.

He shares how a capital-light scaling model and breakthrough “shatterproof” flywheel technology could reshape the future of energy storage.

“Energy storage is one of the cornerstone technologies we need for electrification. The difference between when we generate power and when we use it is now becoming critical and you have to make up that difference with storage,” explains Matthew. 

Levistor, founded in 2021, has already demonstrated its flywheel technology with National Highways and is now raising a seed round to move into commercial expansion. Unlike lithium-ion batteries, which wear out after around 1,000 charge cycles, Levistor’s flywheels can achieve more than a million cycles making them well suited to high-intensity applications such as EV charging, rail, and data centers.

From modular design to a “recipe-based” manufacturing approach, Levistor’s strategy avoids the burden of building factories, focusing instead on mass production to bring the cost down. 

Matthew emphasises the magnitude of the shift to electrification. “We have built our entire civilisational energy infrastructure on fossil fuels. And now we have to change it to electricity in 10 years. The size of that problem is enormous.”

If Levistor can mass-produce flywheels at scale, it could become a defining player in the transition to net zero.

This episode is sponsored by Sustainable Wealth Group.

Levistor Website: https://levistor.com/

Sustainable Wealth Group: https://sustainablewealthgroup.com/

Sustainable Times: https://www.sustainabletimes.co.uk/

Contact: [email protected] 

This week on Profit Meets Purpose, Alexandra French, CEO of Xampla, explains how a Cambridge spin-out is utilising 15 years of research into plant proteins to create plastic alternatives.

Their Moro technology is a plastic-free coating that works like plastic during use, then breaks down naturally once it’s no longer needed. Xampla’s technology has a range of other uses from vitamins to dishwasher tablets.

Fresh from raising a $14m Series A, Xampla is now looking to scale internationally. With regulations around plastic tightening and PFAS under fire, Xampla’s drop-in, heat-sealable materials let brands switch without requiring any changes.

French explains why Xampla scaled through a licensing business model, partnering with established chemical manufacturers to reach ton-scale fast, and how real-world collaborations with companies like Just Eat and Gousto are already putting Morro into consumers’ hands. 

Plus, French discusses the impact of the first Plastic Treaty negotiations earlier this year, and provides clarity on what “fully biodegradable” actually means and we dig into the hidden plastics most people miss, from cup linings to PVOH films and fragrance microcapsules. 

Xampla website: https://xampla.com/

Sustainable Times: www.sustainabletimes.co.uk

Contact: [email protected]

Anthony, co-founder and CEO of SeedLegals, joins Profit Meets Purpose for a candid look at how founders raise, build, and scale. He isn’t a lawyer—he previously led the development of BBC iPlayer and has built multiple startups—and that outsider perspective has helped him see both the product and the customer’s needs more clearly. SeedLegals streamlines legal documentation so founders can focus on what really matters: securing investment, hiring, and growing with fewer mistakes.

Anthony shares his obsession with customer-driven development, illustrated by his well-known “Lindt chocolate test”: bribe users with chocolate, watch them struggle, fix the top three issues, and repeat until the product clicks. He argues this rapid feedback loop beats expensive research cycles, and that in startups, “building stuff” is often a sign you haven’t validated enough. Better, he says, to test with low-code tools or even human-in-the-loop processes, discover what people truly want, then automate once demand is proven.

He also unpacks current fundraising trends. The market is far tougher than the boom of 2021. Higher interest rates mean safer returns elsewhere, and while AI attracts attention, it also adds noise and uncertainty. Today’s investors expect to see revenue earlier, so Anthony advises founders to raise only what they need, keep operations lean, and build traction before approaching venture capital.

This week on Profit Meets Purpose George Thompson, founder and CEO of GT Wings, shares how their technology is sailing the shipping industry into a more sustainable future.

As shipping braces for tougher climate rules, GT Wings is showing that compact, high-thrust wind tech can turn compliance into competitive advantage.

The clean shipping boom has long been promised and is slow to arrive. But if you ask George, the inflection point is in sight and regulation is the accelerant.

“The market’s really coming in 2027. That’s when the regulation hits hard,” Thompson says. For shipowners and operators, he adds, “the cost of non-compliance is growing”. Those two forces, looming rules and rising penalties, are reshaping buying decisions at sea, creating space for technologies that deliver verifiable fuel and emissions cuts.

Borrowing from high-lift aeronautics, GT Wings uses active flow-control fans that “both suck and blow the air at different places”, maintaining attached flow and generating greater thrust from a smaller device. That extra thrust reduces engine load, and therefore fuel use, by “anywhere between five to 35 percent”, depending on route and weather conditions.

Website: www.sustainabletimes.co.uk

GT Wings Website: https://gtwings.com/

Contact: [email protected]