Nic Gorini

South of Scotland innovation turning waste glass into game‑changing low‑carbon buildings A major boost for Scotland’s circular economy: VASO By Eco has secured £330,000 to accelerate the commercial rollout of its pioneering recycled‑glass structural panels — a technology already hailed as a potential solution to Scotland’s housing crisis. With support from our sister agency South of Scotland Enterprise SOSE and BE‑ST innovation centre , Vaso is moving from breakthrough concept to full‑scale deployment: • transforming waste glass into high‑performance modular building panels • enabling faster, cleaner, low‑carbon construction • strengthening local manufacturing and creating new green jobs • preparing to build a full demonstrator home made entirely from recycled material This milestone shows how the South of Scotland is evolving into a natural capital innovation zone, where deep‑tech manufacturing, sustainability and industrial transformation come together. 👉 If your company is exploring circular construction, advanced materials or industrialised building systems, Scottish Development International can help you connect with Scotland’s partners, facilities and funding landscape. #ScotlandIsNow #FDI #CircularEconomy #ConstructionTech #Sustainability #NetZero #AdvancedManufacturing #SouthOfScotlandEnterprise #SDI https://lnkd.in/eeFeQagn

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🚀 The latest episode of The Outside Context is out, and this time Elise Soucie Watts and I talk with Mark Garnier OBE, Shadow Economic Secretary to the Treasury and Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Space! 🌌 I loved Mark’s framing of space as “the next iteration of humankind’s progress”. We have a tendency to think about space as something separate and futuristic - rockets, astronauts, Mars - when actually so much of the #space economy is about doing things we already do, and rely on, but using the resources of space. ☀️ Which brings us to #SpaceBasedSolarPower (or #SBSP, as the cool kids call it...) The concept is relatively straightforward: enormous solar installations in geosynchronous orbit, collecting energy and beaming it back to Earth. The really interesting bit is when you start thinking about the broader potential. A satellite capable of supplying power to the UK could also supply it elsewhere across a huge proportion of the planet, allowing energy to be directed to where demand is highest. In effect, the beginnings of a global electricity grid without needing to physically connect the whole thing. 💡 And this matters because we are going to need a LOT more electricity. AI, data centres, electrification of transport and industry, and economic growth more broadly all depend on abundant renewable energy. SBSP is no longer really a question of whether the individual technologies exist - they do. It’s about whether we can solve the engineering, financing and policy challenges involved in deploying them at scale, and in the hostile environment of space. 💷 We also talked about what it would take for the UK to build an actual #spaceeconomy - not just supporting individual technologies, but bringing together government policy, patient capital, skills, insurance, legal services and the City of London’s financial markets expertise. If you genuinely want to lead in an emerging industry, what are all the building blocks that need to exist around it to make that possible? And also, whether Elon Musk is going to manage to put a human on Mars before the UK manages to get HS2 to Manchester. 😂 🌏 And our OC moment was unusually on-theme! I was recording from Malaysia, where I learned about the incredible voyages of the Ming dynasty admiral Zheng He, whose huge fleets sailed across Asia, the Middle East and East Africa decades before Columbus crossed the Atlantic. That took us into the history of the world that we don’t learn in school, and what we can learn from different models of exploration from the past and apply to the way we approach space. 🎧 Listen to Harvesting the Sun: Space-Based Power and the UK’s Next Industrial Revolution: https://lnkd.in/epD9qBFE 🤩 Thanks as always to our sponsors Markets Evolution and Unblocked and our fantastic production team Helen Disney, Jonathan Marriott and John P Cherian!

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Good recap about key angel groups for founders, worth adding a few boutique climate tech angel networks with high quality dealflow: - Resilient Earth Capital led by Stacy A. Swann and John Paul Moscarella - Andrew Eil's angel network

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A quick look back on last week's top UK venture deals 🔎 17 rounds were shared on Soapbox worth a total of £115m. Highlights included: 📢 SatVu landed £30m in funding led by NATO Innovation Fund (NIF) to capture hi-res thermal imagery from space 📢 FYLD announced its £30m Series B led by Energy Impact Partners to monitor high-risk infra. fieldwork with its intelligence platform 📢 Stacks raised a £17m Series A by Lightspeed to reinvent finance ops with its all-in-one accounting workspace for enterprise teams 📢 SurrealDB secured a £17m Series A extension by Chalfen Ventures and Begin Capital to develop its multi-model database for storing and managing complex information 📢 Toyo announced a £3m seed round led by Frontline Ventures to help companies run operational tasks with an AI agent platform 📢 Made With Intent landed £2.4m in funding led by PXN Ventures North Of England to provide ecommerce websites with customer intent analytics 📢 fulfilment.com unlocked a £4m seed round led by Blackfinch Ventures to replace manual sourcing with ecommerce fulfilment partner marketplace 📢 Bland Company raised a £2m pre-seed led by Initialized Capital to turn overlooked agricultural byproducts into functional food proteins 📢 And Meaningful Planet landed seed funding from SFC Capital to monitor and manage business SIM usage across organisations -- Read Soapbox.vc for every story or hit 𝗩𝗶𝗲𝘄 𝗺𝘆 𝗻𝗲𝘄𝘀𝗹𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 to sign up 📩

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