Housing accounts for more than a fifth of the UK’s carbon emissions, and homeowners have no clear idea where to start fixing that. The problem poses to be two-fold– confusion about what to do, and the costs of carrying it out. It was this double bind that led Robin Peters to found Snugg, a company that helps homeowners in their retrofit journey. Years of unclear advice, five-figure quotes, and a supply chain still living down mis-sold insulation and badly fitted heat pumps have left many homeowners choosing to delay the decision altogether or avoid it entirely. Snugg was built on the idea that removing these barriers could change that — giving homeowners a faster, clearer path forward, while helping the banks, utilities, and local authorities trying to reach them do so more effectively. From early on, that ambition has been built out of the Bayes Centre, the University of Edinburgh's hub for data science and AI — a base Robin credits with shaping how quickly Snugg has been able to turn a good idea into a working product.

“The market gap was, and still is, that most homeowners are confused about what they need to do to their home to make it more environmentally friendly,” Robin says, continuing to elaborate on the struggles this market faces. 

Snugg's platform opens with a postcode, which gives homeowners a clear indication of what they need, what it will cost, and what they stand to gain — with a route to a trusted trader or a loan if they want to go further. Behind that simplicity sits real technical work – a machine learning model, built in-house, that Robin says now predicts a home's energy efficiency more accurately than a standard survey in some cases — the kind of capability Robin attributes partly to being embedded within the Bayes community, built around exactly this kind of problem-solving.

Snugg reaches homeowners through partners already responsible for helping customers decarbonise, rather than marketing to them directly — among them Which?, Greater Manchester Combined Authority, and various banks and utilities. Someone searching home efficiency on Which?'s website, for instance, would be pointed to a home energy plan powered by Snugg.

“Rather than just being a supplier, they've actually invested in us,” Robin says.

Their scale, he notes, brings something Snugg could not build on its own – a brand name. Partnerships like Greater Manchester Combined Authority's Green Homes initiative have tested this approach at a civic scale, with Snugg assembling a consortium of Manchester-based businesses to show it could do more than supply the technology.

Around 40,000 homeowners have used Snugg's platform, with registration rates of 30–35% and roughly 23% of users going on to take real action on their homes — the figure Robin treats as the true measure of success. The company is close to launching a new tool designed to make the financial case impossible to misread: a simple chart setting out a household's bills today against their bills tomorrow, financing costs included, once the recommended changes are made. It's a small piece of design with a large intention — replacing a wall of numbers with a single, honest comparison.

Looking ahead, Robin sees real value in deepening ties to university research, Snugg have already collaborated with the School of Mathematics and the School of Geosciences on an initial project: mapping retrofit motivations through discrete choice experiments, funded by the EPSRC Impact Acceleration Account. One benefit of being located at the heart of the University is the breadth of relevant research expertise to engage with “the university runs large research projects we could draw on particularly around the built environment,” Robin says. Choosing to base the company in Edinburgh, rather than London, was a deliberate decision.

He iterates that, “London obviously has a much deeper pool of talent, experience, and investment, but I think we've actually benefited from being a slightly bigger fish in a smaller pond.” Part of that came down to timing – “when we started, we were already part of FinTech Scotland, and being embedded in that ecosystem really helped,” Robin says.

Robin traces some of that clarity back to where the company is based: "It's a nice blend of everything, and it's also a nice environment to bring people to visit — much more of a community than a typical co-working space." At its core, that's what being at Bayes has given Snugg all along: not just office space, but a quiet layer of expertise, research and community behind the work, so that a good idea has somewhere real to be built. Looking ahead, Robin measures Snugg's progress against a much larger problem — 29 million UK households still needing some form of retrofit — and sees the Bayes ecosystem as central to reaching that scale: a place where the technical work, the research connections, and the everyday conversations with people solving adjacent problems can all sit in the same building." At its core, that's what Snugg has been building all along: not a company homeowners need to find, but a quiet layer of trust behind the businesses they already turn to, so that when mass retrofit finally does arrive, no one is facing it alone, confused, and unsure where to even begin.