Connecting investors to opportunities in clean energy has never been easier thanks to CleanCapital, The Cleanie Awards® 2018 Startup of the Year winner.
The company developed a model for investment matchmaking that canvasses the market for projects and bundles them into high-performing portfolios for investors. CleanCapital’s technology streamlines the acquisition process, enabling them to underwrite and perform diligence on renewable energy portfolios. Then the company manages the project to get the best returns.
Beyond the business model, CleanCapital has hit some major milestones. They manage $465 million U.S. in assets. Just this year, the company announced two acquisitions, an expanded partnership with BlackRock, and two financings. Additionally, the team grew from nine to 15 employees and opened a second headquarters in Buffalo, NY. They also have found that big opportunity lies ahead in distributed generation, particularly mid-size projects that power businesses, schools, and municipalities.
“Distributed energy resources play such an important role in the global energy transition,” said Matt Eastwick, Chief Investment Officer. “Yet the deep and sophisticated pools of institutional capital have, by and large, remained untapped as a source of financing for this category.”
That makes CleanCapital a differentiator – the company applies its technology platform to these fragmented and complex deals and streamlines the acquisition process using consistent standards for judging the long-term performance and risks of an asset.
That, in turn, has garnered confidence from some of the world’s largest investors such as John Hancock, CarVal Investors and BlackRock, which made its first investment in distributed clean energy with CleanCapital in November 2018. These partnerships give CleanCapital the capacity to accelerate its acquisition of clean energy projects – and help ramp investment across the entire industry.