BY: CHRISTIAN ROSELUND
OGE’s C round is the largest venture capital funding round for distributed energy in Africa to date. The company is currently deploying 10,000 home solar systems per month in Tanzania using a leasing model.
Most of the solar deployed to date has been in wealthy nations in Western Europe, the United States and Japan, as a means to substitute dirtier sources of electricity. However, solar power holds huge promise for residents of the developing world, not only a means of clean power, but as a means of electrification.
To date, many of these efforts have been at a relatively small scale, and businesses from the developed world are challenged by working in an environment that is very different than that in their home nations.
At least one company seems to be meeting these challenges and scaling its operations to access this vast, mostly untapped market of the more than one billion people globally who do not have reliable access to electricity.
On Thursday, Off Grid Electric announced that it had raised US$25 million in a series C investment round, led by DBL Partners. Joining DBL are new and returning investors, including the private investment firm of Microsoft co-Founder Paul Allen and eBay Founder Pierre Omidyar’s fund Omidyar Network.
DBL Partners Founder and Managing Partner Nancy Pfund says that the company has a set of strengths that make it suited to this work.
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