By Robert Hokin, Managing Partner, Fundraising101
17 September, 2026, Glasgow.
This morning I enjoyed a well-spent couple of hours at Barclays Eagle Labs in Glasgow at Future Makers, a Circular Glasgow breakfast on where climate innovation meets commercial opportunity. Lisa Torrance from Glasgow Chamber, Natalie Cutting, Rafee Ahamed and the team from Barclays pulled together a properly mixed room: tech, manufacturing, academia, architecture, AI, energy, finance and the arts. Even farming, I think! I was there as the venture capital voice, drawing on thirty years of watching founders raise money, and I left with more than I brought today.
Here is what stuck.
Two founders who made the abstract touchable
Lesley Thomson, CEO and co-founder of Nudge Innovations, told the story of NuWash. She spent ten years at Johnson & Johnson before a Strathclyde entrepreneurship MSc, where a circular economy module taught her that recycling “validates waste.” So she went after the harder problem: making reusable cups as convenient as single-use ones. Her first Scottish EDGE win was a £10k wildcard for a prototype; she has since taken the £90k Scottish EDGE Pathways prize.
Their product journey is a lesson in itself. The early version was touchless, automated and chasing a CE mark: over-engineered, unreliable and too expensive. She stripped it back to a manual door and the patented cleaning technology that actually matters. That version is CE-marked and installed in four units at a large Edinburgh pension company, where general waste collections have already dropped from twice a week to once, and half full at that. The insight I keep coming back to: the machine was only half the answer. Taking single-use cups out of sight, and charging 25p when someone insists, changed behaviour as much as the technology did.
Ben Raw of Hope in Place, a community interest company, works at the other end of the spectrum. His mission is to make the invisible visible: turning climate policy into infrastructure you can sit on. His rain garden parklets are built from 100% recycled plastic and combine water management, biodiversity, seating and education in one unit, with QR codes explaining sponge cities to passersby. Strathclyde bought the first pilot at £22k. His next move is clever: large underground water tanks surfaced as modular, flat-pack street furniture, with room for WiFi, summer cooling and outdoor workspace.
Ben’s three hard-won lessons deserve framing on a wall: interest is not demand, a successful pilot is not a repeatable product, and social value still has to survive procurement.
The barriers were the same story told three ways
Natalie Cutting from Barclays laid out an honest support escalator, from early-stage banking and grant guidance, through relationship managers at around £400k, to her own entry point at £2.5m to £5.5m and a handoff to innovation banking at exit. Free 1:1 mentoring through the Sustainable Ventures partnership, Carbon 13, Unreasonable Impact and the oversubscribed Circular leadership programme with Visa are all real, useful front doors.
But three barriers came up again and again, and they match what I see across my own portfolio all the time.
1. Behaviour change is harder than the technology: every founder in the room was really selling a change of habit, and fighting the fear of upsetting a customer. The winners build “no excuse” environments where the reusable option is the easy one.
2. The funding structure is broken for hardware and climate businesses: five funders means five forms and five relationships, capital that buys equipment but not the salaries to run it, and pre-revenue companies locked out of standard bank support. Lisa put it well: the real cost includes the mental cost, the burnout of endless applications with no guarantee at the end.
3. And manufacturing at scale is the quiet killer: unit economics that only work at batches of 200, and a UK manufacturing gap that pushes good businesses overseas.
Natalie flagged the opportunity to match climate startups with manufacturers ready to pivot, and NMIS at Strathclyde, with its £10m Remake centre, is built for exactly that. Scotland, take note!
Where my day job comes in
Most of what I do is help founders tell the difference between a good idea and an investable business, so here are a few things I said in the room:
Match the capital to the model: venture capital only suits companies chasing a very large exit, and plenty of the businesses in that room, Ben’s CIC among them, are better served by grants, patient capital or blended finance, so take the non-dilutive money first if you can.
Sustainability opens doors, but it does not close the deal: strip the green out and the business still has to stand up to scrutiny.
Impact is necessary; but it is never sufficient enough to get investment. So lead with numbers, not carbon: the founders getting buy-in talk in savings over one, five and ten years, use policy as urgency (the Extended Producer Responsibility bill is quietly making disposable cups more expensive), and point to reference customers, because “if they’re doing it, we can” moves people.
Natalie Cutting made a point I want to amplify: UK venture culture over-indexes on the language of risk. The Royal Academy of Engineering is working on a “patient capital” framing, and it is long overdue, imho. The better question is what opportunities we lose by NOT funding innovation.
A few numbers from the room
The Slido poll was telling. Time and resource were the biggest barrier to doing more, ahead of cost and internal buy-in. And 71% of the room named partnerships as their primary business model. That matters: in climate, the deals and the resilience increasingly come from who you build with, not just what you build.
What’s next? Lots!
There’s a Circular mixer this Friday at Material Source, and another Circular Glasgow and Barclays session in December. Lisa’s challenge to Barclays was the right one: move from conversation events to live problem-solving, where a business walks in with a specific challenge and leaves with a partnership.
That is the room I want to be in next.
At Fundraising 101 I help early-stage tech and climate founders become genuinely raise-ready, not just deck-ready. If you are weighing whether venture capital even fits your business, that is a conversation worth having before you spend a penny on advisers.
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