On December 12, the Mumbai startup introduced it has raised $40 million in Sequence B funding, led by Lightspeed Enterprise Companions, with participation from Lightrock. The funding is the most important such spherical in a photo voltaic startup in India, the corporate mentioned in a press launch. Current buyers Elevation Capital, Rainmatter, Gruhas Proptech and Lowercarbon too joined in.
For India to maintain its promise of hitting net-zero carbon emission by 2070, switching to renewable vitality is an crucial, and startups corresponding to SolarSquare can play a number one function within the transition. India’s fragmented residential photo voltaic market is estimated to have technical potential of greater than 600 GW of rooftop photo voltaic alone, which, nevertheless, plummets to solely 11 GW as soon as financial viability is taken under consideration on the family degree.
That is the place corporations corresponding to SolarSquare are innovating to try to transfer the needle.
Whereas the proportion of Indian households with solar energy is as little as only one p.c by some estimates, “India’s residential photo voltaic story has turned a web page within the final two years,” SolarSquare co-founder and CEO Shreya Mishra tells Forbes India.
An essential cause for that is authorities monetary help, by means of subsidies, has been enhanced, and regulatory readability on areas corresponding to “web metering” has been forthcoming. Web metering refers to photo voltaic panel homeowners giving extra energy again to the grid in return for credit after which being charged for under the “web” use of energy.
This all is now making it doable for startups corresponding to SolarSquare to speed up their plans. Clearly their buyers agree.
Kushal Agrawal, a associate at Lightrock, says “SolarSquare stands out by combining customer-centric innovation, flawless execution and cutting-edge expertise to beat the limitations which have hitherto hindered scale within the residential photo voltaic sector.”
“We’re the primary firm in India to supply rooftop photo voltaic with a promise of assured financial savings, taking duty for not simply the set up but in addition the efficiency of photo voltaic thereafter,” Mishra provides.
SolarSquare is a “full-stack” residential solar energy set up supplier that eliminates middlemen and gives higher buyer expertise, the corporate says. It was based in 2015 by Neeraj Jain and Nikhil Nahar as a B2B operation, however switched to give attention to the residential alternative round 2020, when Mishra joined them.
As we speak, the corporate handles all that’s wanted by a buyer—from design to set up, authorities permits, serving to with loans and offering post-sales upkeep—in accordance with the discharge.
Since its inception, SolarSquare has made installations in 20,000 houses and greater than 200 cooperative housing societies. The brand new funding brings its whole funding to about $61 million, in accordance with personal markets intelligence supplier Tracxn.
And SolarSquare expects to put money into constructing a state-of-the-art asset administration tech stack for distant monitoring and diagnostics of residential photo voltaic techniques. It additionally goals to increase to 50 cities from the 20 it’s current in at present.
Additionally learn: Premier Energies: Meet the early-mover of India’s solar energy journey
House Vitality Model
For Rahul Taneja, the Lightspeed India associate main the agency’s funding in SolarSquare, the massive alternative for the enterprise is to turn into a “dwelling vitality model in India”.
And Taneja sees an important issue on this alternative as one among incomes a family’s belief—from offering life like estimates on what a household’s wants are to determining the technical feasibility of placing up an set up over their home to after-installation service.
“And that belief comes from underwriting to the patron that I’ll ship what I promise,” he says.
He factors to a plan provided by SolarSquare, referred to as GoodZero, which is a assure that the product will carry out as promised. If it doesn’t, SolarSquare will repair it without charge to the patron, as long as the issue wasn’t attributable to elements like deliberate tampering or nature’s fury and so forth.
Within the US, billionaire Elon Musk’s firm Tesla has developed dwelling vitality banks, that are linked to panels made by the corporate photo voltaic X, and the mix makes a house fully unbiased, Taneja factors out. The home will get photo voltaic vitality throughout the day, and energy from the vitality financial institution at night time.
“In India, we’re nonetheless not doing that. We’re night time metering. So, a house continues to be depending on the grid. You possibly can really, over a time frame, be unbiased of the grid,” he says.
SolarSquare is well-positioned to get customers to assume alongside these traces, he says.
“It could take 5 or 10 years, however that’s the way in which that is headed. We would like customers to consider them as a house vitality model, not a photo voltaic installer.”
SolarSquare Founders (L to R) Neeraj Jain, Shreya Mishra and Nikhil Nahar 