GLOBALVARS
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As old and increasingly strained as the U.S. electric grid is, Americans can still mostly count on it to keep the lights on. The average U.S. resident experiences just a few hours of power outages each year thanks to the country’s sprawling electricity distribution system. But that level of reliability is far from standard globally. Across parts of Africa, Asia, and South America, grids can be fragmented, undersupplied, and unreliable, forcing businesses to turn to expensive diesel generators for backup power — or even as their primary source of electricity when the grid can’t reliably reach them.
But as energy demand surges across the Global South, diesel prices rise with the ongoing Strait of Hormuz closure, and costs for solar and batteries continue to fall, the economics of energy in emerging markets are rapidly shifting. Commercial and industrial customers are increasingly turning to distributed solar as a reliable, affordable supplement — or alternative — to a conventional grid connection. The problem is that the small and midsize local companies capable of building these projects often lack the cash to purchase panels and batteries upfront. Equipment suppliers, meanwhile are often reluctant to extend them credit because they see the small businesses as too risky.
Odyssey Energy Solutions is built to solve that disconnect. Founded in 2017, the startup acts as a middleman between local installers and global capital providers that want exposure to developing markets but typically wouldn’t take the risk of financing small companies in unfamiliar environments. After raising a $15 million Series A in 2023, the company announced on Tuesday that it has closed a $74 million fundraising round — $27 million of equity, $47 million of debt — to expand its financing and procurement platform, deepen its presence in core markets such as Nigeria and India, and widen its business in Mexico and adjacent Latin American countries.
“It’s the same story as cell phones leapfrogging landlines,” Emily McAteer, Odyssey’s co-founder and CEO, told me. “It’s distributed energy leapfrogging a centralized grid.”
Today the company has about 6,000 commercial and industrial solar installers on its platform across more than 50 countries, and has facilitated over $3.6 billion in financing for distributed energy projects. Odyssey is planning to use its latest funding to expand beyond solar into other offerings, including financing batteries for electric two- and three-wheelers such as motorcycles and rickshaws, common modes of transit in many of its markets.
Whether it’s solar or motorcycles, Odyssey’s model works much the same way: The company places equipment orders on behalf of installers, letting them pay off the cost over time, after their own customers pay them first. While Odyssey places many small orders rather than large bulk orders with suppliers, its high transaction volumegives it significant purchasing power, allowing it to negotiate far better prices than a small business could. That lets Odyssey earn a margin on the equipment it sells while still offering installers a better deal than they would be able to secure independently.
For the installer, McAteer explained, it’s a pretty straightforward process, “You come to Odyssey’s procurement platform; you upload [the materials you need]. We come back, give you some options and good pricing on the [photovoltaic panels], the inverters, the batteries. You buy from us; you put a little bit down — a small deposit — and then the rest of the payment is due once you’ve gone and built your system, you’ve commissioned, and you’ve been paid by your client.”
Fronting that equipment cost requires significant debt on Odyssey’s own balance sheet. But because installers repay Odyssey once their projects are built, debt is a cheaper way to secure that working capital than equity, which is why it makes up the bulk of this latest funding round. McAteer says the company expects to raise another $50 million in debt over the next six months specifically to fund the extended payment terms it offers installers.
Working with thousands of these small and medium sized businesses also gives Odyssey another valuable asset: a wealth of data on their projects and performance over time. In 2021, the company acquired remote monitoring and controls startup Ferntech, giving it visibility into things like a solar project’s energy output and how customers are using that power. The data then feeds into Odyssey’s underwriting tools, giving prospective investors and lenders a way to evaluate which installers are creditworthy.
That matters because while Odyssey can help small businesses get equipment, these installers still require longer-term institutional capital from the likes of banks or development finance institutions to build their projects and support their ongoing operations. By giving capital providers a window into which installers are reliable and what projects perform well, Odyssey helps derisk the fragmented distributed energy market.
The company’s timing is certainly fortuitous. In Nigeria, one of Odyssey’s primary markets, the cost of diesel has risen over 93% in a matter of months this year due to supply disruptions in the Middle East. That’s thrown the country’s energy markets into disarray, as the country spends roughly three times as much on power from backup diesel generators as it does on grid electricity.
“There is more diesel generator capacity than there are power plants connected to the grid,” McAteer said of Nigeria. “So you already have distributed energy resources — just not renewable resources — powering the grid.” The near doubling of diesel prices has made solar and storage more compelling than ever for the country and the continent as a whole. Governments in many African countries are already offering cash incentives to distributed energy developers once their projects are up and running as part of a broader electrification push backed by a $30 billion joint commitment between the World Bank and the African Development Bank.
India, another core market for Odyssey, has also set ambitious clean electricity goals, aiming to install 500 gigawatts of non-fossil capacity by 2030, while also requiring solar cells to be manufactured domestically. At the same time, the country’s booming data center buildout is poised to drive up electricity demand, putting strain on an already unreliable grid that also depends on backup diesel power. Together, these trends are fueling a solar surge in the country — a wave that Odyssey wants to capture. India is now on track to become the world’s second largest solar market by annual installations this year, according to BloombergNEF — overtaking the U.S. and trailing only China.
“Pretty much in any market where we work, there’s just a lot happening that’s all converging around distributed energy as the future,” McAteer told me. If she’s right, some of the nations with the world’s weakest grids could be the ones best positioned to build what comes next.
