Solar energy is one of the cleanest forms of energy and the EU is determined to ensure it hits the giant ball of nuclear fusion in the sky to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels. Indeed, as part of the REPowerEU plan, the European Commission is considering a route to introducing rules that would mandate the installation of rooftop solar panels on most new and public and commercial buildings by 2026.
But not all countries in Europe have a lot of sunlight. You’d think Spain would be big on solar power, as it’s one of the sunniest countries in Europe — peak hours of the sun in Spain he put it on para eventually with the US West Coast. However, Spain still lags behind Germany or the Netherlands in terms of residential solar panels installed, which could be partly due to a historicalsolar tax,” a tax on solar installations, which the country only dismantled in 2018. Several years later, some startups are finally making moves to make the most of this opportunity.
Based in Barcelona SolarMente, aims to turn solar installations into a mainstay of Spanish homes. Its CEO and co-founder, Wouter Draijer, told TechCrunch that he was motivated to start the company when he flew to Barcelona and got a bird’s-eye view of how few Spanish rooftops had solar panels compared to his native Netherlands. He partnered with Victor Gardrinier, a French national who studied at HEC Montreal and Stanford, to start the company.
Draijer said the company started as an installer of solar panels in Spain, but after the pandemic decided to offer a solar energy management system. In retrospect, this was probably a wise move, given that the panel installation market is already covered by specialist companies, and the reduced cost of panels could make DIY efforts more attractive to homeowners. It also has a few startups to compete with, among them Lumio Solarwhich won the most sustainable startup award at the Southern Summit of Madrid 2023, and Tornasolthe kits of which can be installed on balconies and paid in installments through the BNPL SeQura platform.
“Solar power is not a product,” Draijer said, explaining why most Spaniards can’t or simply don’t want to pay upfront for solar panels. What he means is that people are more interested in what panels can do for them than owning them.
That’s why SolarMente offers subscription-based energy management services that include the installation of solar panels at no upfront cost. And instead of targeting people who live in apartments, the company prefers to sell to single-family homes because it’s easier regulatory-wise and also because the opportunity is bigger, Draijer said.
“We start with solar, but most of our customers can come back to us because we analyze their data and put in an EV battery and charger, a heat pump, and then start managing that energy.”
Recently, the Y Combinator alum added actor Leonardo DiCaprio to its table, becoming its first investment in Spain.
Solar arbitrage
Managing how much energy is used and when is necessary with solar energy, why, how Gardrinier explained in an X thread in 2023, “there is an arbitrage between the price at which households buy energy from the grid and the price at which households sell energy back to the grid.”
Gardrinier told TechCrunch that arbitrage is what inspired him to focus on the company’s energy management, and he was initially interested in seeing how households with solar panels could trade their solar energy with peers on the blockchain.
That interest helped SolarMente win one blockchain-focused hackathon and also to launch a virtual battery service, but the next step in the startup journey does not involve full-on trading. Instead, the startup wants to enable homeowners to optimize their energy consumption with a super app that helps them decide when to consume or sell the energy produced by solar panels.
Of the team, Gardrinier is also the one most closely involved with the fundraising, and provided some context for SolarMente’s funding so far: “The way I like to think about it, with each round you tease your company and your team a little bit more. So with the YC round, the first round of $2 million, with a very core team, we showed that solar could maybe work in Spain. And then we did a much bigger round last year of mostly debt. we built one huge debt structure to finance our solar installations. And with that we wanted to prove that you can offer solar as a subscription service for the price of your gym membership and democratize it.”
DiCaprio’s newly announced investment is part of a larger round of seed equity funding focused on getting SolarMente where it needs to be to raise a Series A. “We’re using this round to really fuel our home energy super app,” Gardrinier said.
Celebrity endorsement
Although this is DiCaprio’s first investment in Spain, the actor has been investing in tech startups since at least 2011. He has also been famous for climate change, which he drew attention to in his acceptance speech at the 2016 Oscars. .
Not all of the actor’s investments have to do with the climate and green technology, but sustainability is a theme in many of them, including AllBirds, Beyond Meat and Styrofoam replacement company Cruz Foam. For SolarMente, it also helped that one of their summer 2021 YC classmates, water risk management platform Waterplan, was already in touch with DiCaprio.
Draijer and Gardrinier eventually met with DiCaprio, Gardrinier said, and “every time we discussed the business and the vision for the energy transition, [DiCaprio] he’d put his phone on and show us one of the projects he’s working on — decentralized storage, etc.”
It probably helped that SolarMente’s approach wasn’t entirely new to the actor. DiCaprio has invested in the past Brilliant, a startup working to install solar power in homes and businesses throughout Mexico. Just like SolarMente, it graduated from Y Combinator and in July 2023 created a $31.5 million Series C;.
Could Bright and SolarMente work together one day? We would say maybe. But first, SolarMente wants to expand further across Spain, where its subscription solar offering just became available nationwide, Draijer told TechCrunch.
Considering how sunny Spain is and how under-equipped it still is, there’s no doubt that SolarMente has room to grow. While its focus on individual homes makes it a somewhat “luxury” offering, it can play a role in reducing the stress that fluctuating energy prices have caused Spanish households. As an advantage, its approach could also play a role in facilitating EV adoption, another area in which Spain room for improvement.
