This blog is a little bit different because it reflects on Kapacity.io's journey from startup to be part of the EnergyHub family. When you're deep in the work of building something, like talking to customers, iterating on the product, figuring out how to grow, it's rare to step back and tell the full story from the beginning.
That's exactly what our co-founder Rami El Geneidy did recently on Episode 23 of Scaling Green-Tech, a podcast by Adopter. From PhD spinout to heat pump control startup to acquisition and becoming part of EnergyHub, Rami walked through the journey of building Kapacity.io and shared what he learned along the way.
It's a conversation we think is worth sharing - not just as a piece of our own history, but because the lessons in it are genuinely useful for anyone building in energy tech right now.
The hardest part was not the technology
If you know Kapacity.io, you know the technical work at the core of what we built is serious. Heat pump control, building optimisation, the software layer that makes hardware perform the way it should. None of that is simple.
But Rami is honest about something that might surprise people: defining the need was harder than building the product.
In energy tech, it's easy to fall in love with the technical problem. The research is interesting, the engineering is challenging, and there's a real temptation to build first and find customers later. We took a different approach.
Before we had a fully developed product, we were already in the market selling building readiness surveys to validate that the demand we believed existed was actually there. Real customers, engagements, and feedback. By the time we were having conversations with energy companies and residential buyers, we were able to demonstrate what we're capable of doing. That credibility, earned early, shaped what came after.
Know your customer before you build
Knowing your customer is about understanding:
- What they actually value -> not what you assume they value
- What they worry about -> the risks and concerns that shape their decisions
- What problems they'd pay to fix -> because willingness to pay is the only real validation
Both selling and building start from the same place. And doing the hard work of understanding the customer before you've committed to a product direction is what separates startups that find traction from those that build something technically impressive that nobody buys.
Why heat pumps have not scaled like EVs (yet)
Heat pump adoption across Europe and the UK has grown significantly over the last six years, in many countries like in Germany, heat pumps are outselling gas boilers. However, technology related to heat pumps hasn't followed the same growth curve as electric vehicles.
EVs built a consumer narrative that worked. Heat pumps, despite being a mature and effective technology, haven't managed the same. There are structural, commercial, and behavioral reasons behind that gap, and Rami goes through what it would actually take to change it.
Not telling any more spoilers, but for anyone working on the residential energy transition, this part of the conversation is particularly worth your attention.
AI and the future of heat pump installation
We see immense opportunities around how AI and multimodal large language models, which could support heat pump installers working in the field.
The installer workforce is one of the most significant bottlenecks to scaling heat pump adoption at the pace the energy transition requires. Tools that can support real-time decision-making, troubleshooting, and customer communication on-site could make a meaningful difference, and the technology to do it is closer than most people realise.
For researchers thinking about the startup route
Kapacity.io started as an idea of Jaakko, Sonja and Rami. Sonja and Rami hold PhDs in energy technology, and that origin shaped a lot of how we thought about building the company. Rami shares honest advice in the episode for researchers who are sitting on interesting technology and wondering whether the startup path is right for them, drawing on lessons from Conception X, Y Combinator, and our own experience.
The short version: the skills that make a great researcher and the skills that make a great founder overlap more than you might think, but they're not the same. Knowing where the gaps are, and being willing to close them, makes all the difference.
We're proud of what the Kapacity.io team built, and we're proud of where that journey has taken us as part of EnergyHub. But more than the outcome, we think there's real value in the story of how we got there; the decisions we made early, the things we got right, and the things we learned the hard way.
This episode is for anyone anyone building in energy, hardware-adjacent software, or making the transition from research into a startup.
🎧 Episode 23 of Scaling Green-Tech is available now 👉 go have a listen.
Rami El Geneidy is co-founder of Kapacity.io and Technology Director at EnergyHub.
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