Glint Solar, a Norwegian software company specialising in tools for solar developers, has raised $8 million in a Series A funding round. The round was led by Smedvig Ventures (which recently backed CultureAI and Semble) with participation from Momentum, Futurum Ventures, Antler’s Nordic fund, and later-stage fund, Elevate.
How will it use the investment?
The new funds will support Glint Solar’s expansion into new markets. The company, currently with 30 employees, plans to more than double its workforce in the next year to meet growing demands. The expansion will focus on adding more team members to sales and product development.
The investment will also be directed toward developing new product features aimed at addressing challenges in solar development. Glint Solar’s platform provides data and insights to help solar developers assess project sites. By 2025, the company plans to roll out additional capabilities, including tools for battery energy storage system (BESS) assessments, helping developers determine optimal locations for storage units.
Jonathan Lerner, Partner at Smedvig Ventures said: “The solar industry has done a great job at developing ways to harvest green energy, but now we need better processes to get these plans in motion. This is the gap that Glint Solar is filling. As one of the first unified products for utility projects on the market, solar developers, engineers, analysts, and management can find everything they need to locate the best land spaces quickly and accurately. This is a much-needed evolution from manually trawling through data from multiple sources, saving considerable resources in all-important green energy projects.”
Accelerates solar power adoption
The solar power industry has seen record growth over the last few years, with the annual global solar PV capacity increasing by 87% between 2022 and 2023. However, more still needs to be done to achieve the goals established in the Paris Agreement.
Accelerating the adoption of solar power and mitigating climate change through its SaaS platform, Glint Solar enables solar developers to evaluate and pre-design sites in a matter of minutes.
How did Glint Solar begin?
Glint Solar was founded in Oslo in 2020 by Harald Olderheim, Even Kvelland, and John Modin. They recognised that while solar energy is a highly effective tool for reducing climate impacts, development projects often progress slowly. With about 73% of solar projects never reaching the permitting stage, they saw an opportunity to create better tools and data-driven insights to streamline the solar development process. Glint Solar’s approach aims to help developers save time and resources by identifying viable projects earlier.
Speeds up solar projects
Glint Solar overcomes this by making the permitting stages easier, smarter, and faster. With its platform, solar developers can triple their project pipeline and evaluate project sites 10 times faster than traditional methods. The platform blends adaptable layout designs and yield estimates with country-specific GIS data and topographic analysis. The user-friendly collaboration hub gives teams full oversight and control over essential project data. 3D-rendered project layouts created in seconds allow users to slash land negotiation times and powerfully communicate projects to stakeholders.
The company has experienced rapid growth since its $3 million Seed round in 2022, with its customer base more than tripling in the last 12 months. The software is used by small to large solar developers and energy companies in more than 35 countries globally, including Recurrent Energy, Statkraft, and E.ON.
Harald Olderheim, CEO and Co-founder of Glint Solar, said: “To counteract the effects of climate change, renewable energy needs to be adopted at a faster pace. The UN IPCC report says that 70-85% of the world’s electricity must come from renewable sources by 2050 to avoid the worst impacts of a warming planet. Luckily, utility-scale solar is quickly becoming the most cost-efficient form of energy one can build – in Texas, for example, it has overtaken coal as the most important energy source. The remaining factor is to also make solar energy development time efficient. Software is at the heart of the solution and this investment allows us to continue to push the boundaries of making complex, fragmented data and insights easily accessible, directly impacting the speed of global solar adoption.”
Gustav Alberius, Chief Strategy Officer at Turn Energy, a customer of Glint Solar, said: “The Glint Solar software has significantly boosted our development processes by having a centralised platform where we can evaluate buildability, permit conditions and yield as early as in the origination process. It has effectively allowed us to triple our project pipeline and reduce development costs. We’re very excited to follow Glint Solar’s continued innovations in the solar software space.”
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