AI-POWERED REFORESTATION AND ACCELERATING RESIDENTIAL SOLAR IN SPAIN

In this week's email: 

• A Spanish start-up wants to build a solar energy OS for homes.

• Chart of the week: Turns out saving the planet is good for business: the EIP Climate Tech Index.

• Quick bursts: Using AI for forrest restoration.

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes, 30 seconds

SAMARA LAUNCHES RESIDENTIAL SOLAR INSTALLATION MATCHING SERVICE IN SPAIN

Madrid-based start-up, Samara, launched a service to match consumers with residential solar panel installation services in Spain. Beyond this week’s launch, Samara looks to build software to help manage alternative energy hardware in the home. 

Co-founders, Iván Cabezuela and Manel Pujol anticipate that consumers will need a way to manage consumption from solar panels, storage in batteries, and selling excess energy back to the grid. They are looking to use the recently raised €2 million in pre-seed funding to build out the software needed to manage these components. Think of it as an operating system for your home’s energy production and consumption designed to minimize your environmental impact and costs. Sounds useful! 

I do wonder, however, if an existing smart home management solution is a better user experience? For example - would it be easier to have Alexa manage both your home’s speakers and your solar panels? Or have Siri manage your home's thermostat and how your home battery manages output to power the thermostat? 

Spain has relatively low adoption of residential solar panels, Samara’s contribution and opportunity lies in helping accelerate that adoption. Does it also lie in building software to manage those installations? I’ll keep an eye on both. 

I have a lot more questions than answers for you on this one. I'm excited about Samara's launch! And I'm excited by the idea of an sustainable home OS, but I'm also very curious about how the company will ease this paradigm shift into consumer habits. Stay tuned. 

CHART OF THE WEEK

Take a look at the EIP Climate Tech Index which aggregates the performance of publicly traded companies that support decarbonization.

Turns out orienting your objectives towards saving the planet is good for business! 

I’m excited by this find, but also cautiously optimistic - given some of the names on the list (see the companies included here) have behaved so wildly since the beginning of 2020.  

One example is Tesla, which has outsized returns for the last several years. However, the index is equally weighted - which means that each stock (each company) affects the index equally - as opposed to depending on the size of the company (market-cap weighted). So that controls for some of these outsized returns in any one stock.

QUICK(ISH) BURSTS

• AI to the (Forest) Rescue!: Vibrant Planet raised a $17M seed round to grow their reforestation SaaS product. Their software allows users (like land management agencies) to map forest density and map the effects of actions like controlled burns. It uses AI to fill in the blanks in spaces that its competitors aren’t able to map with existing imaging methods. By providing users a more complete view into the characteristics of our forests, Vibrant Planet hopes to empower its customers to better manage forest restoration to fight climate change!

• Much needed: Impossible Mining raises $10M to advance their technology to sustainably mine lithium from the seabed. Super important so we don't mess up the seabed while we get more lithium for batteries.

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Thanks for reading! See you next week.