Nearly three years after I first sat down with Dr Somayeh Taheri, it’s safe to say a lot has changed at her Manchester-headquartered cleantech company, UrbanChain.
The business has been on a remarkable scaling journey, growing to 80 staff and recently “surpassing” £1bn worth of live contracts being managed through its data-driven platform.
And having raised around £20m in investment to date, UrbanChain has established itself as one of the UK’s cleantech businesses to watch.
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But with that kind of momentum comes inevitable speculation around valuations, future funding and what comes next. She insists that valuations have never been the driving force behind the business, although she acknowledges they do help.
“Valuations are an impression someone has of you but the important thing for me, to be honest, is about doing the right thing. Not because it’s the best commercial decision, it’s about what I want to solve for people, not what I want to do for my shareholders, necessarily,” she tells me.
“Numbers give you credit – as we just passed a live contract value of £1bn, yes that helps. It means I can go to bigger meetings, I can attract bigger clients, but I can also solve more infrastructure problems. While they are important, it’s also important to do the right thing.”
That philosophy also shapes how she thinks about UrbanChain’s future.
While acquisitions and lucrative exits are often seen as the ultimate prize for fast-growing tech businesses, Taheri says she remains focused on building something with a much longer-term purpose.
“I want to be remembered as the person who fought for markets to work for people. I don’t want to be remembered for an exit.”
It’s a sentiment that won’t surprise anyone who has followed UrbanChain’s journey. Since launching the business in 2017, Taheri has consistently spoken about fixing what she believes is a “broken” energy market by making renewable energy more accessible.
Through UrbanChain’s renewable energy operating system, which supports businesses, infrastructure operators and local authorities to access clean, affordable power, that ambition certainly hasn’t changed.
But what has changed is the scale of the problem UrbanChain believes it can solve.
From peer-to-peer energy to an operating system
When I first interviewed Taheri back in 2023, UrbanChain described itself as a ‘peer-to-peer renewable energy platform’.
Today, she says that description no longer reflects what the business has become.
“That language became very limited. Competition comes in, copies what you’re saying and suddenly that terminology is put in a box and starts meaning something else,” she explains.
“Then you need to evolve your messaging. To be honest, as a founder, if your message is not evolving, then you’re stuck in the past. When your message evolves, the doors open for growth.”
UrbanChain now describes itself as an “operating system for distributed commodities”.
In simple terms, that means the platform helps businesses, local authorities and infrastructure operators to buy and manage electricity, heat and other energy services more directly, removing many of the complexities that have traditionally made renewable energy difficult and expensive to access.
“It’s not just about energy anymore. It’s about all the essential commodities that people’s lives depend on. We have lots of businesses that can’t be productive because they don’t have access to the grid. We solve that.”
She says changing how UrbanChain describes itself has been “very” instrumental to its growth.
Originally focused on smaller generators and businesses, the company is increasingly working with larger organisations and infrastructure projects.
“The message evolved because the market evolved,” she says.
But ask Taheri what really drives UrbanChain and the conversation quickly moves away from technology. Instead, she talks about fairness.
She believes today’s energy market is designed to work best for the largest organisations, while manufacturers, housing providers, councils and medium-sized businesses are often left navigating complicated contracts, expensive consultancy fees and limited access to affordable renewable energy.
She says UrbanChain’s role is to remove those barriers. Rather than telling customers what contracts are available, its platform allows organisations to decide what they need.
Building the next chapter
That philosophy is also shaping UrbanChain’s next stage of growth. Having established itself in electricity, the business is expanding into heat, batteries and private grid infrastructure, with the long-term ambition of creating a single operating system capable of managing multiple essential services.
Looking ahead, Taheri’s focus is on building dedicated specialist divisions to tackle different infrastructure challenges. With the electricity side of the business now more established, she believes it can eventually be led by its own management team, allowing her to concentrate on developing those newer areas including heat, batteries and private grids.
“Our focus now is making sure the infrastructure and processes can keep pace with the growth we’re seeing.”
International expansion is firmly still on the “horizon”, but Taheri believes the UK remains “ahead” of many overseas markets when it comes to energy innovation. For now, the priority is strengthening UrbanChain’s presence closer to home.
Although Manchester remains at the heart of the business, London is likely to become its second major base as it works more closely with regulators, larger customers and its growing senior leadership team.
“Some of our senior leadership team live in London, so we need a London office,” she says. “So London will potentially be the second place we’d grow.”
