Project developers and solution providers have a new partner to finance and build clean energy, water, waste and agriculture infrastructure
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – JANUARY 14, 2016: Generate Capital today announced over $150 million of innovative, sustainable infrastructure programs established in 2015, the company’s first year of operations.
Launched by renewable energy industry veterans in late 2014, Generate Capital provides comprehensive and flexible financing options for innovative solutions in energy, agriculture and water infrastructure. Traditional capital sources often consider these infrastructure projects as too risky or too small in size, preventing capital from flowing despite compelling economic value propositions. As a specialty finance company with permanent, flexible capital, Generate Capital offers multiple types of financing programs to solve project developers’ capital needs.
Generate Capital offers both standard financial products, such as asset backed lending, project finance, asset warehouses and other short-term financing, as well as products custom-tailored to meet the partners’ needs. Established programs range in size from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars across a diverse set of resource-related categories, including the energy storage, solar PV, solar thermal, energy efficiency, biomass, agriculture and wastewater sectors.
"We need to rebuild the world in a far more sustainable way, and that infrastructure overhaul needs new ways of being funded. We work with our partners to provide the right kind of capital at the right time, which we believe makes us the only long- term capital partner for innovators in these important infrastructure and technology categories," said Scott Jacobs, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Generate Capital. "For many years, the market has been crying out for permanent, flexible capital, for transparency in underwriting and for efficiency in transacting, so we designed our business specifically for these purposes."
The financing flexibility Generate Capital offers makes it possible for entrepreneurs and developers to scale their businesses and accelerate their sales pipelines. This Infrastructure-as-a-ServiceTM, no-money-down solution enables customers to pay for the benefits of technology and infrastructure without having to take on the initial capital expenditure or the operational requirements of managing the infrastructure over time.
"We are relentlessly searching for the innovators who are solving the critical problems of our time, and our job is to help these entrepreneurs and executives scale their businesses for both real impact and real profits. We help them create compelling customer value propositions that start with no-money down," said Jigar Shah, President and Co-Founder of Generate Capital. "Customers want to use critical resources more efficiently, but they frequently can’t prioritize investments into these solutions without a ‘pay-as-you-save’ type of model." Shah, the founder of SunEdison, is credited with introducing the no-money-down approach to solar, which helped propel solar from a small niche to the multi-hundred-billion dollar market it is today.
In one program, Generate Capital is partnering with Grundfos, the largest water pump manufacturer and operator in the world, to offer high efficiency water pump systems to residential and commercial buildings. "Generate Capital’s financial partnership allows us to offer customers an appealing lower, fixed-price contract with a faster pathway to shared savings," stated David McLean, Vice President Business Development, Commercial Building Services of Grundfos. "They believe in the value and importance of our products, and worked with us to create a very specific yet mutually beneficial long-term partnership."
In another program, Generate Capital provided financing for businesses to implement battery storage solutions for on-site power management and energy efficiency, dramatically reducing these customers’ energy bills. This battery-based Infrastructure-as-a-ServiceTM model enables developer partners to compress their sales cycle while simultaneously boosting their closing rates, and allows customers to bypass the single up-front expense and pay for the infrastructure with the savings they generate over time.
"Over the last decade-plus investing in energy innovation, it has become increasingly clear that to win in these markets, you need to build that innovation into infrastructure. That requires project financing," said Raj Atluru, a Generate Capital Board member and long-time investor in energy and resource-related innovation. "The magnitude of deals completed in our first year, in addition to the substantial pipeline we’ve built, is evidence of the need for this kind of partner in the marketplace."
Generate Capital is a specialty finance company based in San Francisco, California, founded by several leading entrepreneurs and financiers in the renewable energy, technology, finance and sustainability sectors. It partners with project developers and technology manufacturers globally to finance the Resource Revolution – doing more with less of our critical resources like energy, water, food and materials. For more information on Generate Capital, please visit www.generatecapital.com.
Jennifer Gunst
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Kalen Lagerquist
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