£8.875m · Other round · Energy · Crawley, UK
Naked Energy, a Crawley-based developer of solar-thermal systems for commercial and public buildings, has raised £8.875m in funding led by Great British Energy, with existing shareholder Barclays Climate Ventures participating. Great British Energy is investing £7.5m through its Energy Engineered in the UK programme. The capital will support a new UK manufacturing facility for Naked Energy’s Virtu technology, with the company expecting up to 40 direct skilled jobs and around 100 indirect roles.
From landmark roofs to repeatable manufacturing
Naked Energy’s products address heat demand that standard rooftop solar PV does not serve directly. Its VirtuHOT collectors generate heat, while VirtuPVT combines heat and electricity in the same rooftop installation. The company says the low-profile design can use about 85% of available roof space, compared with roughly 50% for conventional tilted panels that need spacing between rows. That density matters for hotels, hospitals, leisure centres and industrial sites where usable roof area is constrained but hot-water or process-heat demand is steady.
The British Library gives the technology a useful operating reference. Naked Energy says 950 collectors across 712.5 square metres supply 203 MWh of thermal output a year, displacing an estimated 267 MWh of gas and 55 tonnes of carbon annually. The project also had to preserve the silhouette of a Grade I-listed building, turning the collector’s low profile into a practical planning advantage rather than a purely technical specification.
The new factory is intended to convert those reference projects into lower-cost, repeatable supply. Great British Energy and the company say domestic production should reduce manufacturing costs and support deployments across the UK and international markets; the factory location has not yet been chosen. The execution test is therefore less about proving that the collectors can work and more about whether Naked Energy can reproduce them reliably, build installer capacity and translate high-profile sites into a broader order pipeline.
Public-private capital meets a physical scale-up constraint
Great British Energy’s £7.5m commitment anchors most of the round, while Barclays brings an existing investor and distribution relationship: the bank says its network helped connect Naked Energy with the Wimbledon installation. That combination is commercially relevant for building technology, where access to credible customers, designers and installers can matter as much as product performance.
The investment gives Naked Energy capital for manufacturing rather than another isolated demonstration. The risk shifts with it. A planned factory can lower unit costs only if production volume and customer demand arrive together, and the company has not yet disclosed the site or build timetable. Those milestones will show whether the round turns successful reference projects into a repeatable industrial business.
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Daniel Betts & Christian Hernandez Gallardo (Blue Frontier): Climate hardware scales when trust becomes repeatable — Daniel Betts, Christian Hernandez Gallardo & Blue Frontier, EUVC · 8 October 2026. The article examines the same move from field evidence to repeatable production, including when a climate-hardware team must freeze a design and build manufacturing trust.
