Enpal closes out Series C with $174M from SoftBank for tech to make it easier for homeowners to make the switch to solar energy

Key Facts

One of the gating factors for getting more homeowners to make the switch to solar energy has been that solar, as a business, is hard one to get right, with many a company failing when they’ve been unable to strike the right balance between the technology working as it should, provisioning services in a cost-effective way, providing good customer service, and handling their own overhead.
While a number of energy-focused greentech companies in the market today are focused on innovations in how to generate energy or consume less of it, or with a smaller impact on our environment, Enpal is part of an emerging group that are leaning on those innovations, but are themselves more focused on how to make scaling those solutions more practical and profitable.
Another startup called Aurora Solar is tackling this as a B2B2C problem: in May, it raised a $250 million Series C of its own earlier this year for technology that also uses computer vision (along with satellite mapping and other data), which it sells to solar companies to help them automate home installation designs and cost estimates, thereby also reducing the huge costs associated with that.
Enpal has a different kind of challenge, which is that it needs to make sure it doesn’t find itself over-leveraged with the number of solar installations it has out in the market subsidized by Enpal itself, with perhaps those customers not buying as much solar energy as they’d been projected to buy.