Sunswap

Summary

Sunswap's solar and battery-powered transport refrigeration units keep food, medicine and vaccines cold whilst on the road. With the working prototype built and two UK government funded projects underway, Sunswap are accelerating towards deploying their first unit on the road in Autumn 2021.

• Patent-pending software, solar and battery technology
• Working prototype successfully built and tested
• Awarded £217,000 in equity-free government grant funding
• TRU market estimated to be worth £13.4bn in 2030

Idea

Sunswap aims to decarbonise the cold chain with zero-emission Transport Refrigeration Units (TRUs).

Diesel-powered TRUs are expensive to operate and will become even more costly in 2022 when cheap red diesel is banned, increasing costs by 47p per litre of diesel. They are also highly polluting - we calculate replacing a diesel TRU with a Sunswap TRU could be the equivalent of removing 31 cars from the road.

Sunswap estimate there are currently 5.6m TRUs on the road globally. We expect this to rise to 8m units, with a market worth £13.4bn by 2030. We believe electric TRU sales will follow the electric vehicle adoption curve with a 60% year-on-year growth.

Sunswap's patent-pending technology provides operators with a zero-emission alternative to their existing diesel TRUs. A working prototype has successfully proven capability to meet temperature requirements of -22°C. We're collaborating with six major UK supermarkets on product development, with aims to secure sales with them in 2021.

Sunswap is moving quickly and achieved key milestones in 2020:

• March: investment from Sustainable Ventures
• June: filed patent application
• August: awarded £217,000 in equity-free government funding, partnering with Imperial College London and Cenex
• September: prototype testing complete

We're raising to grow the team, build the next generation product and secure sales by the end of 2021.

Team

Sunswap was founded by three engineers after working together for over four years in the transport refrigeration industry, where they were involved in the deployment of TRUs with Sainsbury's, Marks and Spencer and Unilever. Adding together their individual engineering backgrounds, they possess a wide-ranging skill set that puts them in an advantageous position to bring novel transport refrigeration technology to market.

Michael Lowe (MEng), CEO & Co-founder

Originally graduated with a Masters in Automotive Engineering before joining Ricardo PLC. After Ricardo he moved to Dearman Engine Company as a Lead Project Engineer where he was responsible for several sub-systems in their nitrogen-powered TRU.

Andrew Sucis (CEng), COO & Co-founder

A Chartered Engineer with a Masters degree in Aerospace Engineering and a strong technical background. At UTC Aerospace Systems he was involved in the development and qualification of advanced composite products. He followed this up at Dearman by developing technical concepts for use with the Dearman cryogenic TRU.

Nikolai Tauber (MSc), CTO & Co-founder

Extensive background in clean technology having worked at Danish Technological Institute and Dearman developing experimental refrigeration systems and TRUs respectively. Before co-founding Sunswap he worked at Arrival where he led the development of an electric vehicle thermal system.