We Just Raised $112M to Fuel Solar Energy's Growth!
We’re incredibly excited to announce that Cyrus Capital Partners has led our Series B round, along with participation from existing investors, including Series A lead Techstars Ventures. Cyrus partner John Rapaport will join Wunder’s Board of Directors, and Cyrus has also made a sizeable commitment to Wunder’s solar investment funds, further substantiating Wunder’s platform. This is a big milestone for our team, it’s one that has taken an incredible amount of work to reach, and we believe that it will be remembered as a pivotal step towards realizing our clean energy future. As such, we thought we’d take this moment to share Wunder’s plans for America’s solar-powered future.
Momentum
It’s important to remember that while you may hear about solar more and more these days, it still represents less than 2% of our energy generation capacity. With climate change and energy independence becoming ever more important, things clearly need to improve, and fast! As an early-stage technology company, we’re able to take an entirely different tack than incumbents against a problem that desperately needs the kind of thinking that can deliver step-function change. As it so happens, that’s also how things become a lot more exciting.
Since our Series A financing in March 2016, we’ve been hard at work improving our financing platform, scaling our operations, and building a LOT of commercial-scale solar projects across the country. Behind the scenes, our engineering team has been rolling out solutions that provide order-of-magnitude efficiencies beyond the industry’s status quo. We have been streamlining our origination processes, automating our underwriting framework, and bolstering our asset management capabilities. From the start, we haven’t implemented these solutions with 100 projects per year in mind, we’ve done so with 10,000 in mind because that’s what this problem requires.
As you have likely already seen, our work has been paying off -- 2017 was a massive year for Wunder. We grew by more than 10x across key metrics, deploying large-scale solar installations in more than 15 states. We brought on more teammates, partnered with more solar professionals, launched more investment funds for individual and institutional investors, and catalyzed more businesses across the U.S. to go solar, fight climate change, and save money.
When we looked at how to 10x again, we realized that to meet our ambitious goals we could benefit from bringing on additional resources. As we happily discovered, the world is fortunately full of passionate people at great firms that want to help save the world too…
Looking Forward
2018 is shaping up to be truly transformative. With Wunder’s growing momentum, and our new funding, we’re excited to continue solving the world’s most pressing problem. Our Series B funding will enable us to improve on the work we’ve done, expand the scope of our ambition, and achieve our goals going forward.
Investing in Technology
From the outset, we have never defined ourselves as a financial company, but rather as a technology company. We hire software developers, build for exponential growth, and approach problems with a beginner’s mindset but an engineer’s toolkit. Plenty of people can manually source, underwrite, negotiate, structure, capitalize, and service a single commercial-scale solar project, but doing so profitably, and at scale, is an entirely different story. With our new funding, we’re doubling-down on our investment in technology, building tools and automating processes to unlock more of the commercial solar market.
Expanding our Financing Platform
Scale and diversification are core to Wunder’s financing ambitions. Fortunately, both align well with the goals of our borrowers, partners, and investors. To that end, we’ll be expanding our project financing offerings, bringing ever-more competitive terms to the underserved commercial market. We’re also expanding our partnership network, which already includes more than 160 top-tier solar firms across 31 states. And finally, we’ll be introducing new investment opportunities, options, and features for our growing network of individual and institutional investors. To those of you that have worked with us to date (as an investor, borrower, or partner), things are about to get even better!
Empowering Solar Partners
Wunder’s national network of trusted solar professionals is at the heart of everything that we do. To date, we’ve worked hard to provide them with the turn-key financing solutions that are so critical to unlocking the potential of their commercial customers. As we scale, we’ll also be looking at other areas to help them grow their book of business and build as much solar as possible. Our team is already hard at work, developing tools that can help our partners streamline operations, bring in more customers, and prosper.
Thank you!
We’re incredibly excited to bring new resources to bear on this important problem space, but our past and future achievements aren’t and won’t be the result of work done by a room full of Wunder employees. It will be the result of impact-oriented individual investors, financial institutions (like Cyrus), dedicated solar professionals, and of course businesses around the country that want to go solar, save money, and fight climate change. To save the world it’s going to take the world, and with this new funding, we all now have a better shot at pulling our clean and plentiful energy future forward.
We appreciate your unwavering support, and we remain committed to making a lasting impact. Thank you, and as always, God bless the solar cost curve!