When the North East Accelerate Fund announced its £35 million war chest late last year, investors across the region wondered where the money would land first. The answer came in March: Kinewell Energy, a quiet Newcastle outfit that's spent over a decade teaching offshore wind farms how to lay their cables more efficiently.
The £750,000 seed round—modest by London standards, meaningful in the Northeast—marks the fund's inaugural deal. Managed by Mercia Ventures, the investment pushes Kinewell's total capital past the £1 million mark when grants are included. Not bad for a company that started life in 2013 with ties to Newcastle University and has since built a client list that reads like a who's who of offshore wind development.
The timing is deliberate, perhaps. Kinewell clinched a King's Award for Enterprise in International Trade in May 2024, roughly ten months before the funding closed. Companies House filings show a share allotment dated February 6, lining up neatly with the raise. Awards like that tend to catch investors' eyes—especially in a sector where proving you can compete beyond UK shores matters.
Regional Capital, Global Ambitions
The North East Accelerate Fund represents a fragment of the broader £350 million North East Fund, overseen by the North East Combined Authority. It's designed to write checks between £50,000 and £1 million to early-stage companies that might otherwise struggle to attract capital in a region historically overlooked by venture investors. Kinewell's selection as the first recipient sends a signal: cleantech plays with proven traction get priority.
The company says it will deploy the capital to hire 10 people over six months. LinkedIn pegs Kinewell's current headcount somewhere between 11 and 50 employees, a range that suggests a lean operation still finding its growth stride. For a bootstrapped software firm in the energy infrastructure space, adding double-digit staff represents a meaningful expansion—if they can find the talent.
The Problem With Cables (And How to Fix It)
At its core, Kinewell sells efficiency. Its flagship product, KLOC, is a software-as-a-service platform that reconfigures how offshore wind farms route inter-array cables—the electrical veins connecting turbines to substations. The company claims KLOC typically shaves around 20% off cable system costs over a project's lifetime by shortening cable runs and minimizing electrical losses. Whether that figure holds across every deployment is hard to verify independently, but clients keep renewing contracts, which tells its own story.
The product suite has grown. KDOTS models early-stage export and transmission systems. KWOTA optimizes turbine placement to reduce wake losses—the aerodynamic drag one turbine imposes on its neighbors. And in February, at an open innovation event in Blyth, Kinewell publicly discussed KOMET, a tool for evaluating offshore mooring systems. The acronym game is strong.
For developers juggling multi-billion-pound projects in the North Sea or Baltic, even marginal gains in cable efficiency translate to millions saved. Kinewell's bet is that software can outperform traditional engineering guesswork, and so far, the bet appears to be paying off.
Blue-Chip Believers
Equinor, the Norwegian energy giant, renewed a multi-year global contract with Kinewell in 2024. SSE Renewables tapped the company in December 2022 for inter-array layout work on the massive Berwick Bank wind farm off Scotland's coast. Parkwind has also signed on for projects across Europe.
These aren't small-time regional players. They're the incumbents—the ones who can afford to be choosy about their software vendors. That Kinewell has secured repeat business from Equinor, in particular, suggests the product delivers more than slick sales decks.
Dr. Andrew Jenkins, who founded the company 13 years ago, remains at the helm as CEO. Dr. Henna Bains joined as CTO in 2022 after finishing a PhD at Durham on offshore transmission planning—the kind of pedigree that lends technical credibility. Last May, Kinewell brought on Tony Appleton as Chief Commercial Officer. Appleton previously chaired Offshore Wind California, a trade group navigating the nascent U.S. market. His arrival hints at transatlantic ambitions.
The Grant Trail
Equity funding is only part of Kinewell's capital story. The company was among five firms splitting £1.2 million through TIGGOR 2, a regional offshore renewables innovation program, in March of last year. Innovate UK grants helped bankroll translations of Kinewell's software into Japanese and Korean—practical steps toward cracking Asia-Pacific markets, where offshore wind is booming but Western software penetration remains uneven.
ORE Catapult, a UK research organization, pointed to the TIGGOR program as a catalyst for Kinewell's export success in a 2025 case study. The implication: public funding greased the wheels for private sector wins, which in turn attracted the King's Award and now venture capital. It's the kind of virtuous cycle that regional economic development schemes dream about but don't always achieve.
What Comes Next
Kinewell is still small. It's still headquartered in Newcastle, far from the gravitational pull of London's fintech and AI hubs. But the company has carved out a defensible niche in an industry that's only getting larger. Global offshore wind capacity is expected to multiply several times over the next decade, and every new project will need optimized cable layouts and turbine configurations.
Whether Kinewell can scale fast enough to stay ahead of competitors—or potential acquirers—remains an open question. For now, though, the company has validated its technology with credible clients, secured its first institutional funding, and planted a flag as the North East's cleantech standard-bearer.
Not a bad place to be for a software shop that started in a university incubator. And for the North East Accelerate Fund, it's a first deal that at least looks the part.
