Valencia-headquartered off-grid solar company Solaris Offgrid on 13 March announced partnerships with German solar home system (SHS) manufacturer Fosera and French impact investor Gaia Impact Fund.
Solaris and Fosera have been collaborating to integrate Solaris’ software platform, developed through its operations in Tanzania, with Fosera’s customisable solar products, which range from small lanterns and lighting kits to SHS able to power TVs, fridges and fans. Fosera has distributed more than 300,000 SHS to date. The pair expect Fosera products with the Solaris pay-as-you-go (PAYG) platform to be available for order from the end of March.
Fosera founder and chief executive Catherine Adelmann said, “We want to give distributors the chance to focus on their core strength, the last mile distribution, without having to worry about the product, research and development, or the software backend. The partnership with Solaris Offgrid is an important headstone within the offering.”
Solaris’ partnership with Gaia aims to streamline the process of receivables financing – on the basis of future revenue streams from customers purchasing solar products on finance – by providing the lender, in this case Gaia through a €500,000 ($588,000) credit facility, with real-time access to data in order to monitor how its funds are being deployed.
A special purpose vehicle (SPV) will be formed with a portfolio of customers which match the specific risk profile Gaia is looking for. Solaris will develop the portfolio according to predefined credit underwriting criteria, project types, lease duration, and impact goals.
“Solaris Offgrid has years of data that enabled us to choose only the credit risks that match the fund’s mandate,” Gaia investment manager Guilhem Dupuy said. “The Solaris PAYG platform will provide us with real-time data and metrics about the company’s progress in building and managing the Gaia portfolio over the lifetime of the credit facility.”
“While SPVs have attractive counterparty risk-mitigating attributes and provide liquidity for large pools of SHS assets, they can also end up being opaque, complicated and expensive, particularly for relatively small transactions. Our investment objectives were to provide a streamlined financing instrument that was flexible and could be implemented efficiently,” he said.
