households solar energy
Despite being one of the countries in Europe with the most hours of sunshine, Spain has extremely low levels of household solar installations. Madrid-based Samara, a startup founded in May this year — which is launching a service in its home market today — wants to change that, spotting what it believes is a major opportunity to accelerate the market’s transition to renewable energy.
The startup has just closed €2 million in pre-seed funding to develop technology to simplify the process for households of installing solar energy systems, batteries and EV chargers, as well as developing digital tools for householders to manage their usage. The round is led by European and LatAm VC firm, Seaya and Pelion Green Future, an investment holding focused on clean energy and climate tech.
Germany Zolar grabs $105M on soaring demand for solar energy
Samara’s approach looks similar to Berlin-based Zolar, which offers an online configurator to help householders choose a photovoltaic system to buy or rent and other digital energy products, as well as connecting them with a network of local installers to carry out the work.
“We want to really simplify adoption of solar by customers,” says Samara co-founder, Iván Cabezuela. “That means simplifying the experience using software and technology to create easier customer proposals, easier projects — like customers can see where the panels will fit at their home with 3D design, and see what their savings would be, and things like that.”
This will include building an installer management app for the third-party installers Samara intends its platform to work with.
Samara’s other co-founder, Manel Pujol, points to how much more mature Germany’s solar household market is compared to Spain — but he says they’re hopeful their home market can catch up and capitalize on all the plentiful Spanish sunshine.
“In Spain there is a massive gap between the penetration you would expect from a country like Spain and some other countries in Europe,” he tells TechCrunch, citing figures from last year when there were only around 70,000 solar installations completed in the country vs. some 1.5 million in Germany. (For a little more context, Spain has around 6 million households in total.)
households solar energy
