Alexandra Rasch Castillo always wanted to do something impactful around the environment, and coming from a family of entrepreneurs inspired her to start her own company one day.
Born in Guatemala, Rasch Castillo moved to the U.S. when she was 14 years old and went on to study civil and environmental engineering at both Rice University and UC Berkeley.
And that led her to Proterra, a Burlingame-based company that manufactures electrified buses, where she worked on an engineering team that was focused on batteries.
Four years later at the age of 27, she left to start her own company and founded Caban Systems in 2018 with CTO Brian Pevear.
Also based in Burlingame, Caban provides renewable energy, as well as management and storage capability, to telecommunications infrastructure corporations that are looking for more cost effective and resilient energy options.
It's an emerging business sector that's referred to as "energy-as-a-service" — a combination of hardware, software and services that should combine demand management and energy efficiency services, facilitate the adoption of renewables and other decentralized supply sources, and also optimize the balance between demand and supply, according to a report from Deloitte.
Specifically, Caban serves the owners of electric cell towers, which are used to distribute the increasing amount of data between internet-connected devices, such as smartphones and even cars. Its customers in the U.S. include SBA Communications as well as consumer wireless providers.
"All of our customers are looking for cost reduction," Rasch Castillo said. "And even though it's been a very difficult climate to raise capital in, I still think the energy sector is one where I see it not only being more important but I also see more focus in this area."
On Wednesday, the company announced a $51 million Series B that was led by BCP Ventures and also included Ontario Power Generation Pension Fund, Ember Infrastructure, Portfolia and Inspiration Ventures. That brings its total funding to over $94 million, according to PitchBook.
Latine founders raised 1.5%, or $2.7 billion, of all venture capital deployed in 2022 through October, according to Crunchbase. But that was a significant drop from 2.5% the previous year. Later-stage were particularly hard hit.
Rasch Castillo credits Caban's early investors, such as Inspiration Ventures, for aiding her success.
"They were our first money in, and they have been fantastic," Rasch Castillo told me. "I look nothing like the two founders of the fund but yet they've unlocked a lot of opportunities for us."
Caban primarily serves Latin America at the moment with operations in Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and Puerto Rico. It has also recently expanded into the U.S. and is planning additional expansions into Asia, the Pacific and Middle East.
In addition to the Bay Area, it has offices in Dallas, Miami, Guatemala, Colombia and Jamaica.
One-fifth of the towers that it services previously ran on gas-powered generators, Rasch Castillo told me. By switching to Caban's solar-powered systems, its customers have been able to reduce their emissions while also stabilizing their energy costs.
The company designs and manufactures its own lithium-ion batteries and storage system, and is expanding its domestic manufacturing capabilities, which are based in Dallas. Doing so will enable Caban to benefit from incentives that have been earmarked for climate mitigation efforts in the Inflation Reduction Act.
To generate the renewable energy that it provides to its customers, it installs solar panels onsite, and while Caban doesn't manufacture these itself, it owns and maintains them.
And it uses proprietary software to monitor and manage its systems.
Most of Caban's products have been designed in-house. Rasch Castillo wanted to have control over the company's designs, roadmap and supply chain.
"We were purposely built for this industry, number one. And number two, it was a way for us to mitigate our own supply chain. We did not want to rely on a third party," Rasch Castillo said. "Relying on a third party is always very constraining in terms of what you can do and the pace at which you can move. Number three, from the moment we started, we've diversified our product portfolio and designing everything in house allowed us to look at different applications and continue expanding and innovating. And fourth, because we could. … We knew how to."
Customers pay Caban recurring monthly fees over a period of 10 or 20 years, depending on the length of their contracts.
The company currently has 130 employees and will continue expanding across manufacturing, software and commercial teams, Rasch Castillo said.
