Ten years ago this month, two Grimsby friends asked a question over a bottle of wine in Lee Sutton’s living room: why couldn’t anyone charge an electric car from rooftop solar? They couldn’t find an answer on Google past the second page, so they set out to build one themselves. The product they made, a solar-compatible EV charger they called zappi, has now been joined by a 250-employee company they named myenergi.
myenergi is marking its first decade with a circa £50 million annual revenue guide and a millionth product sale in sight, according to CEO Andrew Clint. The headline staffing at the ten-year mark is 250 employees across the UK, the Netherlands, Ireland, Germany and Australia. The decade between that Grimsby living-room conversation and the current five-country footprint spans a period of growth, a sharp 2023 contraction, two rounds of redundancy consultation, and a January 2025 leadership change. Both founders remain shareholders, and Lee Sutton has stayed at the company in the new role of Chief Innovation Officer. The CEO who took over from him, Andrew Clint, joined from outside the founding pair after holding senior roles at Dell, De La Rue and OpSec Security, the appointment announcement set out in January 2025 confirmed.
How Did a Grimsby Conversation Become a £50m Business?
The myenergi founders’ story, told in their own words on the company website, dates back to October 2016. Sutton, an electrical engineer with renewable energy start-ups behind him, had wanted to charge his EV from the solar PV panels on his own house, and could not find a product that would let him. Brompton brought the marketing and sustainability network; Sutton built the product. The first prototype took almost a year to develop, and a crowdfunding round the founders ran for £40,000 returned £10,000, leaving them with what Brompton later described as a future that “didn’t add up.”
The turning point came after Brompton drove a first-generation Nissan Leaf to an Orkney trade event and met Robert Llewellyn, the YouTuber behind the Fully Charged channel, on the ferry crossing. Llewellyn filmed a behind-the-scenes piece on the still-prototype zappi, and “the phone began to ring,” she wrote. Investors came next: Sir Terry Leahy, the former Tesco chief executive, and Bill Currie invited the pair to Liverpool, heard the pitch, and wrote the first £1.8m cheque after telling the founders to come back asking for more than the £150,000 they had originally requested. The trajectory that followed, from hand-soldering units in a countryside workshop to a multi-product international line-up, is set out in the founders’ own decade-by-decade milestone timeline. That timeline is the company’s primary public record of its own history. It runs from the 2016 founding through the 2017 product launches, the 2020 pandemic-era expansion, and the 2023 shipment of the 500,000th product.
Brompton’s role through those years was as the public face of the business: investor pitches, awards stages, the Downing Street conversation about UK green-tech acceleration, all logged in regional press coverage at the time. myenergi shipped its 500,000th product in early April 2023, the company previously announced, and the 50,000th had shipped four years earlier in 2020. By 2022 the brand had reached ninth place in the Sunday Times Hundred fast-growth table, on year-on-year sales growth of 216 per cent and turnover of £50m, per regional reporting at the time.
The trajectory took myenergi from a hand-soldering countryside workshop to a 66,000-square-foot purpose-built facility at Stallingborough with on-site solar power generation. By 2023 the company had absorbed four product launches and five country expansions and ranked twenty-sixth in the Sunday Times Hundred. By 2026 the headcount at 250 sat well below the 450 of mid-2023, and a new CEO was in the chair. The decade since Sutton and Brompton sat down in his living room has, in CEO Andrew Clint’s recent framing, run faster than either founder originally expected.
The Numbers Behind the Millionth Sale
At the heart of myenergi’s offering sits the zappi, an EV charger Sutton and Brompton sold as the world’s first solar-compatible unit when it launched in the late 2010s. Around it, the company has built a line-up of three further devices: eddi, a power diverter that routes surplus solar generation into hot water and underfloor heating; harvi, a wireless energy-harvesting sensor that lets installers fit zappi and eddi without running a wired current transformer to the consumer unit; and libbi, a smart home battery that lets households store their own self-generated power. A fifth component is software: the myenergi app, a centralised control surface the firm rolled out in 2019 to manage every device in one place. The portfolio has since added the zappi GLO, a simpler plug-and-charge variant the company developed for customers who don’t want settings on the charger itself. Each product is part of a single integrated system the company describes in its own strategy documents as a unified home energy management stack.
The growth that took the brand from £50m of revenue in 2022 to £67m the following year was concentrated in zappi, per myenergi’s own published statements at the time. UK sales of zappi units alone reached roughly 55,000 in 2022, nearly double the 29,000 shipped the year before, the company reported, with Brompton framing the move as 96 per cent year-on-year growth in zappi sales against 40 per cent growth in pure electric car registrations. The growth figures earned myenergi a Sunday Times Hundred ranking twice, at ninth in 2022 and twenty-sixth in 2023.
Behind those rankings sat a business model with multiple routes to market. Residential demand for solar-compatible EV chargers, the segment zappi still leads, drove most of the headline growth. The launch of eddi and libbi gave the company a second and third revenue stream inside the home, expanding each zappi install into a broader hardware attach. Demand from electrical wholesalers and a network of more than 3,000 approved zappi installers added a third route, per myenergi’s own founders’ timeline. A fourth leg was international, with subsidiaries in Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany and Australia named on the company website. By the year to May 2023 the company’s revenue had grown to £67m, enough for a twenty-sixth-place finish in the Sunday Times Hundred.
- ~250 current employees across five countries, per CEO Andrew Clint
- ~£50m current annual revenue guide from CEO Andrew Clint
- 500,000 cumulative products shipped by early April 2023, per the company
- 9th-fastest-growing UK private company in the Sunday Times Hundred for 2022
- £67.6m revenue in the year to May 2023, per UK Tech News reading of filed accounts
Headcount Fell From 450 to 250 Between 2023 and 2026
The myenergi of 2026, at around 250 staff, looks different in headcount from the myenergi of mid-2023. A BusinessLive report from that May put staff at almost 450, even as around 100 roles were flagged at risk of redundancy at the start of a 45-day consultation. A company spokesperson at the time cited the cost of living crisis and slower than expected growth in the firm’s largest EV charge-point markets, where consumer incentives had been removed. Earlier rounds had already moved 30 roles into redundancy and a further 69 into voluntary redundancy, per UK Tech News reading of the period.
A second round of redundancy consultations began at the end of January 2024, the company confirmed to UK Tech News at the time, citing continued lower than expected sales. The financial backdrop was a profit slump: net profit for the year ended 31 May 2023 had fallen to £9.8m, including £972,000 in tax credits, from £14.1m the year prior. Pre-tax profits dropped from £14.9m to £8.8m across the same span, the most recently filed accounts showed. The current CEO’s 2026 headcount of around 250 employees sits well below the mid-2023 peak. Revenues grew from £53.8m to £67.6m across the same period, the company disclosure to UK Tech News confirmed.
myenergi’s response to the slowdown combined three moves visible in the company’s own communications over the period. The first was a tighter production and product roadmap, anchored around the existing zappi, eddi, harvi and libbi line-up. The second was a £30m debt facility from HSBC UK arranged in April 2023, followed by a further £30m from Energy Impact Partners later that year.
The third move was an expansion of subsidiaries into markets where EV adoption was at an earlier stage, in particular Australia, the Netherlands, Germany and Ireland. The £30m of debt from HSBC and the £30m from Energy Impact Partners gave the firm runway to invest in international expansion even as residential demand eased. The new subsidiary structure put the company’s European distribution through a warehouse in Maastricht, shipping into Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, per a Manufacturing Today interview. By the time of the July 2026 milestone, the firm had run for ten years through a period of growth, contraction, restructuring and selective re-expansion.
The January 2025 Leadership Reset
The leadership change that arrived at the end of January 2025 put professional management at the top of the restructured business. Jordan Brompton, the co-founder who had been myenergi’s public face through eight years of growth and contraction, stepped down as Chief Marketing Officer. Lee Sutton, the other co-founder, moved from CEO to Chief Innovation Officer at the same time. Andrew Clint took over as Group CEO, the move set out in the announcement of Andrew Clint as CEO on the company website. Brompton remains on the board as a director and shareholder, per the company’s January 2025 statement.
Brompton’s exit drew coverage in regional and national business press, and the pair both retain significant stakes in the business they grew from the back of a workshop. On her own social profile at the time, Brompton wrote about the eight-year journey from a hand-soldered prototype to a multi-country business turning over more than £50m a year. Her personal website now frames her as investing in early-stage start-ups and helping the next generation of innovators scale their impact.
I started with -£20k in my bank with my business partner and now one of my best friends Lee Sutton [and grew] to a £50m+ turnover business.
Jordan Brompton, who stepped back from her executive role after eight years, wrote that line in her personal social media statement at the time of the handover. Andrew Clint, in the same January 2025 announcement, framed his own mandate as one of extending myenergi’s product line-up across the UK, Europe and Australasia and helping customers unlock the full potential of their energy transformations. His CV, set out in the announcement, traces through finance and business development roles at Dell, time as managing director for the authentication division at De La Rue, and the chief commercial officer seat at OpSec Security. Sutton, in his new role as Chief Innovation Officer, has kept responsibility for the product engineering behind zappi, eddi, harvi, libbi and the newer zappi GLO. The ownership and governance structure that remains at the top of myenergi is two founders as shareholders and a director each, a professional CEO at the helm, and an executive chairman in the chair. Executive Chairman Peter Richardson closed the announcement by wishing both new appointments every success.
Fleet Charging Becomes the New Route to Volume
The route myenergi is taking to the next million sales runs increasingly through fleet operators rather than the original home-by-home model. In late summer 2025 the company announced a partnership with BT and Openreach to equip thousands of their engineers with zappi chargers for at-home overnight charging, the deal set out in the BT and Openreach zappi charger announcement. The partnership covers the electrification of BT Group’s commercial van and company car fleets, with installations carried out by delivery partner OVO Energy. Openreach runs the UK’s second-largest commercial fleet, the announcement noted, with more than 5,000 electric vans already on the road and more than 2,500 home chargers deployed.
The fleet work sits inside Openreach’s “Let’s Reach Zero” sustainability strategy. Judy O’Keefe, Openreach’s Director of Fleet, said the partnership supported the company’s target of switching the majority of its fleet to electric by 2031. Drew Barrett, BT senior fleet manager, said the zappi units would slot into the time-of-use tariffs already used by BT engineers. The pattern of fleet and partner-channel deals reflects a transition away from the residential EV charge-point demand that drove myenergi’s 2022 growth. Hive Home app integration with zappi chargers, announced by Centrica in 2025, runs alongside the Openreach deal on the broader partner side of the customer mix.
The flagship zappi the company launched is now sold alongside the zappi GLO, a simpler plug-and-charge variant aimed at customers who don’t want settings on the charger itself. Andrew Clint described the GLO in a Manufacturing Today interview as a product designed for mass-adoption EV drivers, with the original zappi kept available for users who want configurable on-unit controls. The 2026 product line also includes eddi (a diverter that sends surplus solar power to hot water and underfloor heating), harvi (a wireless energy-harvesting sensor that cuts installation wiring), libbi (a smart home battery that integrates with the rest of the system), and the myenergi app.
Each product has been added on top of an existing zappi install, with eddi as the second myenergi product, harvi third, and libbi the most recent (debuted at Solar and Storage Live and put into production shortly after the announcement). The expanded line-up is engineered with a circular-economy lens, per myenergi’s own sustainability strategy statement. Clint told Manufacturing Today that the zappi GLO has a 35 per cent lower embodied carbon footprint than the original zappi, achieved through design optimisation that reduced the printed circuit board size, components, plastics volume and packaging. The same factory at Stallingborough that hand-soldered the early units now houses a 66,000-square-foot production facility with on-site solar generation.
| Product | Function |
|---|---|
| zappi | World-first solar-compatible EV charger; flagship product of the myenergi home energy management line |
| zappi GLO | Simpler plug-and-charge EV charger; 35 per cent lower embodied carbon footprint than the original zappi |
| eddi | Solar power diverter; routes surplus renewable generation to hot water and underfloor heating |
| harvi | Wireless energy-harvesting sensor; cuts the wiring needed to install zappi and eddi |
| libbi | Smart home battery; stores self-generated electricity and integrates with zappi and eddi |
| myenergi app | Centralised control surface for every device, including smart-tariff optimisation |
The Roadmap Beyond the Millionth Sale
The forward-looking case Andrew Clint has set out is built around three moving parts: Gridpay, vehicle-to-grid (V2G), and Eastern European expansion. Gridpay is a 2026 priority that lets end consumers earn from their smart energy assets by participating in grid balancing through the capacity market. V2G is a charger the company is developing to be compliant with the ISO 15118 standard that all chargers sold in the EU will be required to meet from January 2027. Clint described the rationale in the Group CEO’s interview on the product lineup as an issue of battery capacity: an average home battery system in the UK might be a ten kilowatt-hour system, but an average EV can be as high as 100 kilowatt hours. That battery-energy math puts the parked EV at the centre of any future home energy setup, in myenergi’s roadmap planning. The same interview sets out the company’s plans to expand beyond the existing five countries into Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, using the Maastricht warehouse as the European distribution hub.
The Eastern European expansion runs through the company’s Maastricht warehouse, which myenergi has identified as the European distribution hub. The Dutch warehouse already ships primary product into Germany, the company said in the Manufacturing Today interview. It is also widening that footprint into Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, markets where EV adoption runs at an earlier stage than in the UK. The pair of moves reflects a strategy of building stock and shipping reach before pushing demand, rather than chasing each new market individually. Beyond Eastern Europe, the company is evaluating other EMEA regions where home battery storage would help balance the local grid, Clint said.
We are also looking at other regions in EMEA, not only based on EV adoption, but also where home battery storage will help to balance the local grid.
Andrew Clint, myenergi’s Group CEO, said that in the Manufacturing Today interview. The Sutton and Brompton idea tied solar and electric driving together; Clint’s version adds the same hardware into grid stabilisation services. The myenergi product line that started with a single hand-built charger and a bottle of wine has, in either framing, produced a circa £50m-turnover business still operating out of the same Humber region.
