Aurora Solar, a SaaS startup developing software that enables solar installers and financiers to design and sell residential solar remotely, raised $50 million in a Series B led by Iconiq Growth, along with existing investors Energize Ventures, Fifth Wall, and Pear VC. This brings the company’s total investment to over $70 million.
Aurora is helping to shift the solar industry from manual and in-person processes — to doing everything online.
Aurora software’s lets solar installers perform remote solar shading analysis, design solar and storage rooftop systems, forecast energy generation, calculate savings, and produce sales proposals with financing choices. Vendors including SunPower, Momentum Solar, Black & Veatch and Namaste Solar are working with Aurora, according to its website.
Solar stocks have had a strong 2020 — and Array Technologies’ IPO along with Joe Biden’s potential $2 billion climate plan — will drive capital across the solar market stack in 2021. Other renewable energy software startups winning venture funding this year include Terabase and Station A.
It took a pandemic, but the U.S. residential solar (and storage) industry has finally figured out how to lower customer acquisition costs — move everything online. BloombergNEF is confident that Americans will install a record 3 GW of solar on their homes this year and 3.6 GW will be installed in 2021.
The combination of online sales strategies and a new set of homebound, energy-curious customers has enabled the market to grow 22% in a cataclysmic year. Covid-19’s sudden arrival put resiliency at the forefront of people’s minds and accelerated adoption of digital sales practices.
Over the course of this strange year, American residential solar companies claimed they could weather the Covid storm with software, remote selling and new online strategies. It turns out they were right.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.