Somerville-based Raptor Maps, a solar software startup that spun out of MIT in 2015, has closed its Series A round at $5 million.
The round was co-led by Blue Bear Capital, Data Point Capital and Buoyant Ventures. Congruent Ventures, Powerhouse Ventures, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center and Y Combinator also participated.
Winner of the 2015 MIT $100K business competition, Raptor Maps combines drone technology with AI software to collect aerial data and convert it into high-value system analytics for solar companies. The startup originally found its home in the agtech sector, using its drones to measure crop quality to maximize yields, and graduated from the highly acclaimed Y Combinator startup Accelerator in 2016.
Raptor Maps pivoted in 2018 when it partnered with EGP North America to focus on the solar industry instead. Now, the 17-person startup's goal is to be the "Dropbox for solar," as co-founder and CEO Nikhil Vadhavkar describes it, optimizing operations for solar farms.
Raptor Maps streamlines a slew of processes that have traditionally weighed down the solar industry. Its drones can take photos of rooftops, eliminating the need for a person to go out and measure things like the height of parapets and the exact locations of exhaust pipes—and eliminating the potential for human error to be introduced. Its data-driven software, meanwhile, generates analytics that help solar farm operators minimize their costs.
"We put a lot of work into our data model up front," Vadhavkar said. "That gave us the capability to create a data model for every particular solar farm we processed. When we talk about expansion, we can tell our customers, down to the individual solar panel, data about that panel... We automatically create documentation, too."
With the new funding, Raptor Maps plans to build additional capabilities into its solar data model. It will also increase its headcount by at least 50 percent, Vadhavkar estimates; he plans to hire software engineers, a technical product manager, a director of sales and a handful of account executives. Normally based in cleantech incubator Greentown Labs, the team is currently remote.
“People think of solar as being just panels and wires,” Ernst Sack of Blue Bear Capital said in a press release. “The industry has evolved to rely on a tremendously rich and complicated supply chain, with dozens of operations and hundreds of counterparties involved in any given plant—just as one would expect for other energy and infrastructure asset of this scale. Raptor Maps is building the digital operating system to coordinate and manage all of this activity for maximum productivity, efficiency and safety.”
Raptor Maps has customers in more than 35 countries, including Enel Green Power, Greenbacker Renewable Energy, McCarthy Building Companies, QE Solar and SOLV.
The startup raised its last round of funding just over a year ago. That round, whose amount Raptor Maps did not disclose, was also led by Blue Bear Capital, with participation from Congruent Ventures, Powerhouse Ventures and Y Combinator.
For Vadhavkar, the funding is a validation not only of his own startup's viability, but that of the entire cleantech startup industry, which has been chronically underfunded due to investor wariness.
"Oftentimes, people look at climate and renewables, versus profit, as an either-or," Vadhavkar said. "It's inspiring to us and should be inspiring to everyone. You don't have to trade off building a good, sustainable, for-profit business with climate and doing good and having these outsize impacts on the world."
