Climate · Nairobi
Solaris
Financing rooftop solar across East African cities.
- Stage
- Series B
- Founded
- Founded 2018
- First invested
- We invested 2018
- Team
- 182 people
- Board
- Board seat
- Total raised
- $62M
- Current stage
- Series B
- Team
- 182
- Founded
- 2018
What they build
The product, in plain terms
Solaris builds financing rooftop solar across East African cities. The company started in Nairobi in 2018. We backed it at pre-seed and have worked with the team through Series B.
- 01
Software that plugs into physical infrastructure already in the ground, rather than assuming new hardware.
- 02
Measurement that holds up to an auditor, since most of the value here is contractual.
- 03
Deployments run by the operator's own crews, which is the only way this scales past a pilot.
Where it stands
Numbers the team watches
Reported by the company at its most recent board meeting. We publish what founders are comfortable publishing and nothing more.
- Assets under management
- 15.9K
- Verified reduction
- 91%
- Deployment payback
- 2 days
Why we invested
The note from the first meeting
“We met Solaris in 2018, back when the customers were utilities and industrials, and they moved at the speed of a regulator. The founders had already chosen the unglamorous version of the problem and were further along on it than anyone else we had seen. That is usually the whole thesis.”
- Hired its founding engineering team out of the alumni network.
- Went from prototype to paid pilot in a single quarter.
- Signed its first design partner before the program ended.
Founders
Who is building it
Both founders were in the room the day we wrote the check, and both still run the company.
Keiko Ito
Co-founder and CEO
Was employee nine at a company that got this wrong, and says so plainly.
Mateo Reyes
Co-founder and CTO
Prototyped this on nights and weekends for a year before it became the job.
Timeline
How it has gone
The version we would give another investor, including the years where nothing looked like progress.
- 2018
Founded
Keiko Ito and Mateo Reyes start Solaris in Nairobi around a single wedge: financing rooftop solar across East African cities.
- 2018
We invested
We wrote the pre-seed check and took a board seat. Priya Nair has worked with the team ever since.
- 2019
Paid customers
Contracts replaced pilots, and the company stopped selling a roadmap and started selling a product.
- 2020
Series B round
Raised at $480M, led by an investor we introduced during diligence. We took our full pro rata.
- 2026
Where it stands
182 people, selling in more markets than it started in, still run by the two people who wrote the first version.
Alongside us
Co-investors
We share rounds with people we would want on our own cap table.
- Uncork Capital
- Kleiner Perkins
- Amplify Partners
- Foundation Capital
Working here
Open roles
Solaris is hiring in these areas. Mention us and the note gets to the founders directly.
- Grid engineering
- Policy
- Field deployment
Building something next to Solaris?
We are usually early to a category and happy to be early again. Send us the short version.