Luke Nicholson takes a late and frugal lunch of soup and bread in the fourth-floor conference room of a former fabric warehouse in London’s East End. The walls are thinly-painted brick, the floors are bare wooden planks, and there’s a visible gap by a nearby window frame, letting air and light in through a place they shouldn’t go.

It’s an unlikely setting for Nicholson’s company Carbon Culture, a cutting-edge clean-tech startup that writes software to monitor energy consumption, expenditure and carbon emissions in eight U.K. government departments, and is about to roll its product out to the private sector. Keep reading →