Glint Solar holds $8M to help accelerate solar deployment across Europe

Solar energy is booming, which is good news for Glint Solar. A Norwegian software-as-a-service startup has built a platform that helps energy giants and major solar developers like E.ON, Recurrent Energy, and Statkraft reduce the time it takes to plan and pre-design solar installations to accelerate the transition. of renewables.

Glint software pulls data from multiple sources to help speed up the evaluation of a Solar project. The platform includes flexible building designs and yield estimates, as well as specific geographic information system (GIS) data and topographic analysis to make it easier for solar developers to evaluate potential sites. Cloud-based collaboration features allow teams to access critical project data. The platform can also be used as a project presentation aid by providing 3D rendered project structures “in seconds.”

Since TechCrunch last talked about the weather startup in June 2022, when it closed a 3 million seed round, its customer base has grown nearly 10 times, according to CEO and co-founder Harald Olderheim. It is now announcing an 8 million Series A to continue fueling the growth fire by expanding into more markets in Europe.

Its main customer regions are currently France, Germany, the Nordics, and the UK but with new funding, the SaaS launched in March 2020 will expand its sales teams to target customers “all over Europe,” including Italy and Spain. , said Olderheim.

One notable change since the launch of Glint Solar is that it has narrowed its service offering to support ground-based solar installations – reducing the focus of the two previous products that included floating solar installations.

Olderheim said the software can still be used to program floating solar. But he noted that there is a huge need for ground-based installations. “It’s a big market,” he said, explaining why they chose to streamline their sales process.

Glint Solar is also not focused on rooftop solar installations. Some of its customers use its software to help plan solar arrays on “big roofs” too, with Olderheim. But, again, the reason not to focus on the effort there is because it follows a large chunk of demand.

“If you look at the market, about 60% of the market is utility, to a large extent. And then about 20% have a big roof, and 20% live. So we want the biggest market,” he told TechCrunch. “If you want to make a big impact on the world … we can do it by using the scale of resources, because that’s much faster if you’re going to build scale [solar] power in the world.

“If you think about the impact we’re making with a single, large solar plant — like 10 megawatts, maybe 7,000 or 15,000 solar panels — it’s a very effective way to increase energy production quickly.”

Maximizing impact

Another focus of the Series A capital injection is product development. Olderheim said the startup will expand its platform to help customers plan where to place batteries that can be used to maximize renewable investment through energy storage.

Things like grid capacity, protected areas, and noise (since batteries make some noise when they’re running) are all considerations the software will be able to factor in, according to Olderheim, as well as providing customers with support to ensure battery-to-battery compatibility. proposed solar and helping them share information with landowners as they work to obtain the necessary permits.

He emphasizes how much the cost of solar installations has fallen over the past decade (down about 90%). But he also says the projects aren’t happening as fast as they need to given the ongoing threats of a warming planet driving waves of disasters, from devastating floods and hurricanes to heat waves, droughts, and wildfires.

“It takes time for all the agreements – with the landowner, with the grid, and with the municipality – to be in place [deliver a solar project] and all these processes take time; so that’s one of the reasons why we made Glint Solar,” he adds.

The startup is focusing on software development to increase accessibility as another strategy to help remove friction from solar project approvals.

“We’re making it easy to use so everyone on the team can use one piece of software together and work on solving this problem [project delivery] very quickly. And you can share everything – with the landowner, with the grid, with the municipality – so they can make decisions very quickly with low risk. “

The platform has many “modules” that allow the same person to, for example, “assess the site, plan all the projects, and design the solar park,” according to Olderheim, supporting project teams to issue multiple requests.

He also touts the platform’s cloud-based collaboration features that allow everyone to work on “the same tool,” which he suggests helps give it an edge over other tools.

Glint says customers report its SaaS helps solar developers triple their project pipeline on average and evaluate potential sites 10x faster than traditional methods.

Of course software can only do so much. Olderheim agrees that infrastructure investment and regulatory changes are key to accelerating solar deployment, pointing to grid capacity and solar permits as key areas for lawmakers to address.

“Sometimes it takes five years from a [project] to start building,” he said, adding: “I know that the EU is looking at this to reduce it to 12 or 24 months. So I think that’s great [start].”

Glint Solar’s Series A is led by Smedvig Ventures, with additional investment from Antler Nordic and Antler Elevate, Futurum Ventures, and Momentum.

Commenting in the statement, Jonathan Lerner, partner at Smedvig Ventures said: “The solar industry has done a great job in developing ways to harvest green energy, but now we need better practices to keep these systems going. This is a gap that Glint Solar fills. As one of the first integrated utility project products on the market, solar developers, engineers, analysts and managers can find everything they need to find the world’s best locations quickly and accurately. This is a much-needed shift from manually drawing data from multiple sources, saving huge resources for critical green energy projects.”