Edinburgh sustainable materials company Kenoteq has banked almost £900,000 in a first tranche led by Kelvin Capital, alongside the Scottish Enterprise Co-Investment Fund and existing shareholders. The round remains open and the company is targeting £2m in total.
Kenoteq makes the K-Briq, a masonry unit manufactured from close to 100 per cent recycled construction and demolition waste. The product carries less than 5 per cent of the embodied carbon of a conventional fired clay brick, because it is not fired at all.
The technology originated at Heriot-Watt University and the company has spent recent years moving from laboratory validation into commercial supply — the transition at which most materials businesses either scale or stall.
Kelvin Capital led the tranche. The Scottish Enterprise Co-Investment Fund invested alongside it, and several existing backers increased their positions rather than allowing their stakes to dilute. Valuation was not disclosed.
The structure matters for the cap table. By closing a first tranche at roughly £900,000 and keeping the round open towards a £2m target, Kenoteq is raising against demonstrated commercial traction rather than pricing the whole round at today's terms. Follow-on from existing shareholders also limits the ownership reset that a single-close round would have imposed.
The proceeds are earmarked for production capacity. Kenoteq is scaling K-Briq output to service a project pipeline across healthcare, hospitality and commercial construction.
That pipeline is the substance of the investment case. K-Briq has been specified on a major NHS development in Wales, described as one of the health service's most sustainable hospital projects. The company is also supplying theatre and restaurant schemes in London, a bakery in Surrey, an extension at Stoke-on-Trent College and a Heriot-Watt campus building in Dubai.
"This investment is another significant milestone for Kenoteq and reflects the confidence our investors have in both our technology and our commercial strategy," said chief executive Andrew Holt, pointing to momentum translating into commercial projects across multiple sectors.
John McNicol, director at Kelvin Capital, said Kenoteq was "exactly the kind of business Kelvin Capital likes to back: proven technology, a clear commercial strategy, and a team turning innovation into real-world impact".
The cheque is modest by the standards of UK deep tech, where semiconductor funding alone has passed £237m this year. But materials businesses are capital-hungry in plant rather than headcount, and the constraint on Kenoteq is manufacturing throughput against a specified order book — a problem that £900,000 of tranche-one capital can begin to solve, and £2m more comfortably.
Whether the balance of the round closes on current terms will be the test of how the market prices Scottish climate hardware in the second half of 2026.
Original source: DIGIT — https://www.digit.fyi/scottish-sustainable-construction-tech-firm-kenoteq-raises-900k/
