Preethi Jayakumar

Preethi Jayakumar is a controls and instrumentation engineer whose career has spanned clean technology start-ups across electric vehicle systems, outdoor air pollution control and microbial energy research. She holds a Master of Arts from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, where she first connected with Dhruv Shah, and has collaborated with researchers at Imperial College London on novel energy systems using brewery waste and magnetotactic bacteria. Her personal experience of living in a damp, poorly ventilated home — where mould grew on the walls — became the direct catalyst for Anzen's founding mission.

As CTO and co-founder of Anzen, Jayakumar leads the technical development of the Anzen Climate Wall, a solid-state heat pump that uses Peltier thermoelectric technology to deliver heating, cooling and ventilation in a single wall-integrated appliance. The device requires no refrigerants, no outdoor unit and can be fully installed in under two hours, making it the first product of its kind designed specifically for hard-to-retrofit UK housing. Jayakumar has been instrumental in taking the technology from concept through prototype — developed at Park Royal Open Workshop — to CE-certified systems now in pilot deployment with housing providers.

She has received the Futures Thinker Award from the Distributed Design Awards 2023, funded by the European Union, and was a finalist in the Stanford Longevity Design Challenge for an earlier air-purifying roof panel innovation. Anzen has been backed by Carbon13, Sustainable Ventures, Desai Ventures and One Planet Capital, and raised £1.1 million in pre-seed funding in 2025 as it moves toward commercial rollout and its goal of decarbonising one million UK homes by 2035.