The Reason for Energize’s Growth Fund

Yesterday Aurora Solar announced their $250M Series C. When Energize led our ~$14M investment in 2019 we most certainly did not imagine this growth potential for Aurora and the solar industry at large. The industry/company is hitting new highs and COVID forced firms to accelerate digital adoption.

Beginning around Q3 last year we started seeing the near-term TAM across our portfolio begin to get bigger as demand levels leapfrogged a number of years… creating more immediate scale. As a result, the upside case for our portfolio and thesis in general began to increase. Like in the movie JAWS, we realized we “needed a bigger boat”. Our best companies can and likely will reach higher commercial traction than we projected and require more capital to meet the growth opportunities that lay ahead of them. With that knowledge, we went into action and raised our first Growth Fund, alongside hiring Kevin Stevens to manage that existing and future opportunity.

Aurora Solar is one of our (currently) four investments in this first growth Fund. Kevin wrote yesterday’s blog post on our continued investment into Aurora. In his post he talks about one of the main reasons for the new scale opportunity for renewables-focused software and I wanted to highlight it here:

A theme that can be seen across the renewable energy spectrum is hard costs on the decline. Solar is perhaps the best example of this trend, and we are seeing the decreasing cost of hardware create demand from consumers and businesses alike. Along with growing demand comes new challenges, such as accurate design and efficient permitting. The best solutions for these pain points? We believe it’s software.

Kevin Stevens, Principal at Energize, Head of Growth

As hardware costs have declined, software is now required to enable the scale of the renewable energy verticals. Now is “go time” and Energize is ready to serve this market from early commercialization through the growth stage.