In a bid to help strengthen Scotland’s green heat supply chain, Scottish Enterprise has awarded more than £750,000 to 16 businesses.

During a recent Onshape User Group meeting, attendees heard from Corrin Fox, Co-founder of Kionnali, who articulated the company's mission to provide a sustainable, efficient, and portable housing solution. Fox elaborated on how Kionnali's agile development methodology and utilization of cutting-edge technologies, such as cloud-native CAD, are propelling this hardware startup closer to achieving its ambitious goals.

As well as clean heat veterans and growing start-ups, Scotland is also home to some completely new arrivals, specifically for clean heat. Kionnali Living Systems was founded by American couple Corrin Fox and Avriel Skolnick in 2022. The two of them were living off-grid in the US and compiled a spreadsheet of potential global destinations where they could realise their energy-efficient concept for sustainable living systems. Scotland came out on top.

Bloomberg today reports that the UK will have a shortfall of almost 100,000 homes per year, and will need to build almost 400,000 annually, over the next five years. With that in mind, there’s a timely theme to our two startups this week. They’re both tackling challenges in the housing market around the world in different ways.

"I'm really proud of the culture we are building," said Corrin. "We try to give all our team members a voice to allow the company to adapt and improve as quickly as possible. "This has helped create a lively and flexible work culture that's key to our success. We have a lot of fun and drink a lot of tea. It's just a nice place to come to work every day."