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This startup finds the best deals on solar-panel installations. Check out the 16-slide pitch deck Otovo used to raise $34 million in a post-IPO raise.
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- A startup that helps consumers get the best deal on solar-panel installations raised $34 million.
- It is Otovo’s first raise since its IPO last year. The cash will be used to expand across Europe.
- Insider got an exclusive look at the 16-slide pitch deck it used to lure in investors.
Otovo, a marketplace for residential solar-panel and battery installations, has just secured €30 million ($34 million) in a post-IPO raise.
The Oslo-based company allows consumers to search for solar installations and be matched with the best-priced tradesperson. Installers input the area they want to cover, the cost of their equipment, labour, driving costs, scaffolding — all the stuff that goes into making a system — and their address. This data is crunched with details of the job, including the size of the house, which is tracked using satellite imagery, aerial photography, or cadastre data, to assess a tradesperson’s suitability.
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The installer with the lowest price is recommended, which is typically the business closest to the job site. Otovo is a managed marketplace so it has a vetting process, inspects a new installer’s first jobs, and monitors reviews. To ensure quality, installers must also use the same equipment.
It listed on the Euronext Growth Exchange in Oslo last year and has a market capitalization of around 1.75 billion Norwegian kroner ($195 million).
The company rallied its cap table for further investment, with Nordic solar investor Axel Johnson AB, Obos BB, and Norway’s climate fund Nysnø Klimainvesteringer AS all pre-subscribing for pro rata shares. Existing investors contributed €10 million of the fresh funds.
To raise the earmarked €30 million, Otovo called other investors within its network, including those who have contacted the startup after quarterly presentations. “It’s like a call center, you call in the money and you see the book add up,” cofounder and CEO Andreas Thorsheim told Insider. “It’s like an auction for those shares, it happens really, really fast.”
Thorsheim created a new pitch deck for the raise, presenting it just four or five times during the day. In a private funding round, founders would court tens of investors and pitch 40 to 50 times, he said.
The cash will be used to fuel further expansion across Europe. It currently operates in seven markets and plans to launch in six more by the end of 2022. Thorsheim plans to have “a rapid-fire approach” and is eyeing the UK, Netherlands, Portugal, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Czech Republic, and Croatia.
The 220-person team will more than double to 500 in a year. It will have boots on the ground in each of its new markets, with teams of around 20 to 30 people initially, according to the company
Ovoto hopes to be Europe’s dominant residential-solar marketplace. To help it get there, it tweaks its offerings across different markets to take into account regulation and installation requirements in countries across the bloc, the size of the solar-panel systems needed depending on the country’s climate, how big the average house is, and how far the country is in its electrification journey, Thorsheim said.
“In Scandinavia, it’s ice-cold half of the year. You have a lot of electric heating. A lot of homes have electric cars, so consumption is maybe 20,000 to 30,000-kilowatt hours per year. In Spain, they’re going to have an air conditioner, they are not going to have a lot of heating, and they’re going to maybe do more gas cooking. So they’re going to be at 5,000-kilowatt hours per year,” Thorsheim said.
Check out the redacted deck below.
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