Solar energy is booming, which is good news for Glint Solar. The Norwegian software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup has built a platform that’s helping energy giants and large solar developers such as E.ON, Recurrent Energy, and Statkraft cut the time it takes to plan and pre-design solar installations to accelerate the transition to renewables.
Glint’s software pulls in data from multiple sources to help speed up solar project assessments. The platform features adaptable layout designs and yield estimates, along with country-specific geographic information system (GIS) data and topographic analysis to make it easer for solar developers to evaluate potential sites. Cloud-based collaboration features allow teams to access essential project data. The platform can also be used as a project presentation aid by serving up 3D-rendered project layouts “in seconds.”
Since TechCrunch last spoke with the climate startup in June 2022, when it closed a $3 million seed round, its customer base has grown almost 10x, according to CEO and co-founder Harald Olderheim. It’s now announcing an $8 million Series A to keep stoking the growth fire by expanding into more markets in Europe.
Its main regions for customers currently are France, Germany, the Nordics, and the U.K. but with the new funding, the March 2020-launched SaaS will be expanding its sales teams to target customers in “the rest of Europe,” including Italy and Spain, Olderheim says.
One notable change since Glint Solar launched is that it’s narrowed the service proposition to support the planning of land-based solar installations — dropping an earlier dual product focus that had included floating-solar installations, too.
Olderheim said the software can still be used for planning floating solar. But he noted there’s more demand for ground-based installations. “It’s a bigger market,” he said, explaining why they’ve opted to streamline their sales approach.
Glint Solar also isn’t focused on roof-mounted solar installations. Some of its customers are using its software to help plan solar arrays on “big rooftops” as well, per Olderheim. But, again, the reason it’s not focusing effort there is because it’s going after the largest demand chunk.
“If you look at the market, about 60% of the market is utility, large scale. And then about 20% is big rooftops, and 20% is residential. So we are going for the biggest market,” he told TechCrunch. “If you want to make a big impact in the world … we can do it through the utility scale, because that’s much faster if you’re going to build increase the [solar] energy in the world.
“If you think the impact we are making by one solar plant, a big one — like 10 megawatt, maybe with 7,000 or 15,000 solar panels — it’s a very efficient way of growing the energy production fast.”
Expanding impact
Another big focus for the Series A cash injection is product development. Olderheim said the startup will be expanding its platform to help customers plan where to site batteries that can be used to optimize renewable investments by storing energy.
Factors such as grid capacity, protected areas, and sound (since batteries produce some noise once operational) are all considerations the software will be able to factor in, per Olderheim, as well as providing customers with support to ensure a battery is compatible with the proposed solar array and helping them share the information with landowners as they work to obtain the necessary permits.
He emphasises how much the cost of solar installations have dropped over the last decade (down around 90%). But he also says that projects still aren’t happening as fast as they need to given the existential threats of a heating planet that are driving waves of disasters, from devastating floods and hurricanes to heatwaves, droughts, and forest fires.
“It takes time to get all the agreements — with the land owner, with the grid, and with the municipality — to [deliver a solar project] and all these processes take time; so that’s one of the reasons we are doing Glint Solar,” he adds.
The startup is very focused on software design to maximise accessibility as another tactic to help remove friction from solar project approvals.
“We are making it very user friendly so everyone in a team can use one software together and work on this problem to make [project delivery] much faster. And you can share everything — with the land owner, with the grid, with the municipality — so they can easily take decisions much faster with the lower risk.”
The platform has multiple “modules” that allow the same person to, for example, “evaluate the site, organize all the projects, and design a solar park,” per Olderheim, supporting project teams to get more applications out.
He also flags the platform’s cloud-based collaboration features that allow everyone to work “in the same tool,” which he suggests help give it an edge versus other tools.
Glint says customers are reporting its SaaS is helping solar developers to 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 reform are key to further accelerating solar rollouts, pointing to grid capacity and solar permitting as the main areas for lawmakers to tackle.
“Sometimes it takes five years from a [project] to start to get building,” he points out, adding: “I know the EU is looking at this to reduce it to 12 or 24 months. So I think that’s a very good [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 a statement, Jonathan Lerner, partner at Smedvig Ventures, said: “The solar industry has done a great job at developing ways to harvest green energy, but now we need better processes to get these plans in motion. This is the gap that Glint Solar is filling. As one of the first unified products for utility projects on the market, solar developers, engineers, analysts and management can find everything they need to locate the best land spaces quickly and accurately. This is a much-needed evolution from manually trawling through data from multiple sources, saving considerable resources in all-important green energy projects.”
