OpenSolar has Raised US$15 Million to Double Down on Supporting YOU, the Solar Installer

Solar is now the lowest cost electricity on earth – and we’re about to electrify everything, our cars, our heating, our lives. And so the world will once again be powered by sunshine, only this time with 8 billion humans living on it. It’s an insanely interesting time to be alive and in solar!

But will it happen in time to avert runaway climate change?

Manufacturers are scaling, the capital is there, demand for low cost energy has never been higher. And the arithmetic is simple: by scaling at 25% per annum we’ll hit 100% solar by the early 2040s.

But how do we globally scale what is fundamentally millions of smaller-scale, local solutions?

It is our belief at OpenSolar that you, the entrepreneurs selling and installing solar electrification locally, are the key to solving the global climate crisis.

With this funding we’re going to double down on supporting your teams, your brands, your efficiencies, your growth – YOU are the heroes of the climate war, and we exist to make you successful.

Adam & I started OpenSolar five years ago to have this exact impact. We’d built up decades of experience with solar and software around the world as early direct-to-consumer solar entrepreneurs ourselves, and we realized that we could build absolutely the best sales technology and services toolkit to help solar professionals to scale.

But, rather than build regional sales and marketing teams to charge lots of money for the software and restrict its use, we decided to build the best technology and make it available to every solar professional everywhere in the world, at zero cost.

We’ve set out to let solar professionals of all shapes and sizes configure the tool so it’s unique to your brand, with your content, your look and feel, digitally connected to whatever existing tools you currently use. The ‘Solar Pro’, as we call you, controls your own hardware, pricing, collateral, sales process, customer journey, team, your data, everything!

It’s amazing to see how our white-label technology morphs into so many different looks out there now in over 130 countries, connected to thousands of Pros’ individual CRMs and systems, and in use on myriad devices! But common to every solar professional’s experience is the fastest, coolest and most accurate design and sales tool – and the best 24/7 support from our Pro Experience team.

So that’s why we do what we do. And we’re becoming commercially successful too, to be a sustainable, long term partner to the world’s solar professionals.

We now are proud to partner with 75 trusted hardware, finance and service providers, whose solutions are now integrated into your OpenSolar app. This brings a one-stop-shop efficiency to your business – everything in one place.

These partners pay OpenSolar a revenue stream to connect their services to you – and that enables us to sustainably invest in new features and solutions for you, the solar professional, to keep it the best tech for free, forever. We truly think it’s a win-win.

I’m really proud of how our team has come together to deliver this solution around the world! We’ve worked hard, and used our 250+ years of collective solar experience selling and installing – to get you what you need. We’ve grown to be the world’s leading solar design and sales platform. And today we’re announcing more resources applied to our mission, with US$15M of new capital invested into the business by an Aussie-US technology VC firm, Telstra Ventures, a European Sustainability fund, 2150, and a group of leading entrepreneur-investors.

Because we don’t do fancy offices and branding campaigns or operate giant sales teams trying to lock installers into long-term contracts, we can continue to deliver the best tech with a lot less. In the months and years ahead, with this US$15M expect to see even more kick-ass features, more electrification, more configurability (more YOU), more post-sale solutions, and more awesome services from trusted partners in even more geographies – watch this space!

Thanks to the team for getting us here, to the new investors for their commitment to our mission, and especially to you, our installer community for trusting us as your white-label growth machine, working away in the background to help you efficiently scale.

Here’s to a restful and safe holidays, and then dialing it up for the next phase in the battle for a clean, safe and sustainable world!

Birchy & the wonderful team of Openers

P.s. if you’re interested in the formal press release announcing the funding, please take a look.