Even as a biomedical engineering student, Nikhil Vadhavkar aimed to cross the “chasm” between the lab, where he saw engineers develop all sorts of interesting medical devices, and the market, where very few of those devices managed to land.
“I realized that what I was passionate about was bringing something to market and having a meaningful impact,” he told Latitude Media.
Years later, as the CEO and co-founder of solar asset management software company Raptor Maps, Vadhavkar is taking his company across a similar chasm: the Valley of Death.
Last month, Raptor Maps announced the closing of $35 million in Series C financing, backed by investors such as Maverix Private Equity, MKB, and Blue Bear Capital. The raise is a sign that the company has moved from its initial development stage to commercialization, with 71 gigawatts of solar assets under management globally and “hundreds” of customers.
It’s an achievement that happens infrequently in the cleantech sector, especially today. Even raising a Series B now takes on average twice the time it took three years ago, and investors are becoming more careful about where they put their capital.
“It used to be growth at all costs, and now it’s growth with a clear pathway to long-term sustainability,” Vadhavkar said. “People need to see several years ahead and have that confidence in the company’s ability to endure and grow. That was our personal experience in the [Series] C. The bar is higher.”
‘Timing is everything’
While there’s no clear formula for Raptor Maps’ success so far, good timing played its part.
In 2015, Vadhavkar and his fellow co-founder Eddie Obropta were both working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when they decided to create a company that would sit at the intersection of three sectors: climate, IoT and robotics, and software. Climate activism was picking up steam, advances in robotics were hitting an inflection point, and software frameworks were becoming more advanced. (OpenAI was founded in the same year.)
“We realized that we could create digital twins of assets in the real world, and use sensors to optimize the inputs and outputs [of the assets] and have a positive impact on climate,” Vadhavkar explained.
Raptor Maps’ first target market was agriculture, where it monitored the amount of water and fertilizer going into fields and adjusted it to maximize produce while minimizing environmental damage. Soon enough, however, they started getting calls from the solar sector.
“It turns out that [our] framework was incredibly useful for a similar problem in the solar industry, which is how do I represent a solar farm and figure out where exactly I need to focus my attentions and efforts to maximize the output,” Vadhavkar said.
So Raptor Maps redirected its efforts towards the solar industry, which was about to explode — between 2016 and 2021, U.S. installations of solar panels saw a 60% increase. Raptor Maps followed the sector itself as it scaled rapidly.
“Timing is everything,” Vadhavkar said, stressing that the company launched at a moment when the solar sector was large enough to have clear pain points that needed solving, but young enough for Raptor Maps to be there from the earlier days in order to “really understand how customers were thinking about their data.”
The end product is reminiscent to the real estate search engine Zillow, Vadhavkar said. Solar asset managers use it to survey their properties, track and inspect damages, organize lease agreements, and so on. “It’s a solar-specific data model where you can go as granular as a tiny component of a solar panel and zoom all the way out to the global solar landscape,” he added.
Built for solar, period
With its 2015 start date, Raptor Maps is a fairly early adopter of AI, which has allowed it to accumulate years of solar data as the industry evolved and expanded.
Its software is multi-modal, ingesting and processing many types of data collected through in many different ways. Sensors installed in the solar farm track sunshine, wind, and inverters’ performance. Drones collect geospatial and image data. Humans record their field observations. And all this invaluable data is used to train an AI model created by Raptor Maps itself.
“We’ve been working on the data model to apply AI to solar for many, many years, way before the big explosion of AI over the past year,” Vadhavkar said. “A system of record is a necessity for adopting AI in the renewable industry.”
This razor-sharp focus on its own industry is, according to Vadhavkar, another one of the reasons why the company has successfully crossed the Valley of Death. By developing a software that attempts to solve a long-term business issue — solar farm monitoring and optimization — the company is staying with its customers “year after year after year,” and developing deep sector expertise.
“Utility-scale and commercial solar is our industry, full stop,” he said. “And that means that we have been able to get to problems at a much deeper level and architect our software in a way that works beautifully for the industry.”
