Lockdown engineers lock-in funding pledges

A leading-edge compressor manufacturer in Edinburgh has secured nearly three quarters of a million pounds in new funding.

A clutch of existing investors, including Par Equity, Equity Gap, Aero Den and the Scottish Investment Bank, the investment arm of Scottish Enterprise, have given their backing to Vert Technologies.

Chief executive, Dr Phil Harris, pictured above with Nicol Low, head of production, said: “This is a highly gratifying vote of confidence from investors with intimate knowledge of the progress we have been making over the past 18 months in bringing innovation to the global compressor market.

“With the additional funding, we will be ramping up both sales and production, putting ourselves in a position to bring our exciting new products and technology to a wider audience from which we anticipate substantial take-up”.

Several new products are set to hit the market once the Covid-19 emergency subsides. Its newVert A150 compressor, alongside its A100 model, incorporate a design that has been hailed as one of the biggest advances in the compressed air industry in the past 40 years.

The product range will be further extended towards the end of the year with the launch of a sub-25kg compressor model aimed primarily at the fibre optic installation market.

Development projects are also in the pipeline to extend the reach of the high-pressure Vert technology into the refrigeration market, an application for which it is ideally placed.  

A new, quiet vacuum concept product, powered by the Vert Conical Rotary Compressor technology, which is capable of continuous operation, has also now been developed.

Dr Harris added: “We continue to accelerate sales of our compressor units. We are also excited about the potential to exploit the benefits of our technology across a variety of markets, which is why we are particularly pleased with the potential of our CRC technology for the high-pressure refrigeration market as well as in vacuum.”

Founded in 2013, Vert employs 15 people at its Technology Manufacturing and Design Centre on the southern edge of Edinburgh.

The CRC technology has won multiple awards since the first working prototype was produced in 2014 and led to the company securing a prestigious government grant in 2019 from the UK Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).