100 million Investment funds “Highland Europe”, “Energize” and “Elephant” invested US dollars in the Lithuanian start-up. The investment funds are said to have invested in PVcase because of their long-term ambition to integrate all stages of the solar power plant design and operation process into a single platform. About new projects, “The Postedia” spoke with the founder and director of the company, Deividas Trainavičius.
– David, for those who have never heard of your company. What are you doing exactly?
– My career in solar energy has been long. It all started in 2009 in London. I worked there for a solar energy company.
Later, I opened my own consulting company in Bremen, Germany. In this document, we have focused on solar energy projects that will be built in Europe. The team grew and we lived like this until 2018, then we received an investment of 500,000. EUR.
After a while, we separated the companies (consulting and PVcase-ed.), because after creating the software, we realized that there was no such software on the market. Customers started asking if they could buy it.
Now, we recently celebrated our 5th anniversary, and together with the American company (Anderson Optimization – ed.), which we acquired in June, we have a total of around 200 employees.
– You mentioned earlier that you don’t have many competitors in the world. Something changed?
– We remain the leader and have become even stronger. We have an even larger market share. We are now working with solar energy companies from 75 countries.
Currently, similar software is offered by several companies around the world, but they are dozens of times smaller.
What I have realized over these years is that when you create the most innovative product and become the market leader, customers want to choose you even more. We are already such a company on a global scale.
– In the fall of 2021, you announced that you had attracted 23 million USD investment. How did you achieve your goals and how was the last year in general? We had a pandemic, a war, an energy price shock.
– No matter how it looks like the worst case scenarios in the world have happened, it has benefited us, as more people have started looking into energy independence, it has activated the market.
For us, last year was even faster and even better. Change a lot technical sector, there were a lot of layoffs, but that only made our business easier because we hired a lot of people.
We used to quadruple, but it was easier to do it when you’re not that tall. Our goal now is to double our growth every year.
– Solar power plants have become a highly sought-after product, probably as well as the corresponding software. Have you noticed a spike in orders?
– External factors helped us a lot, but we felt that our customers could not grow either.
They lack talent, employees, the number of projects sometimes increases every year, and to implement and do them faster, you need software that automates a lot of work. That’s why we grew so fast because we gave them this software.
– But on the other hand, since you work in b2b, you probably have strong business acumen: when they save and prepare for a crisis, and when they can afford more, they invest. The recent period of the economy has not been very easy. What is the situation today ? Maybe companies are investing their last money in energy?
– Although logically this could be the case, the reality is the opposite.
The amount of money spent on renewable energy is now the highest of any country. Everyone understands that there are a lot of opportunities and everyone tries to take advantage of them. It’s the most popular place every business wants or feels compelled to be. They are under pressure from government, managers and society. It used to be nice to haveand now there is must have.
– It’s fresh news that your company raised 100 million. USD investment. Is it true that this investment is the second largest in the history of the Lithuanian start-up sector after the success of Vinted?
– There are not many such investments in Lithuania, so as far as I checked, yes. We are after Vinted, another 100 million. was seduced by the company Nord Security.
– Who are these investors? How did you attract them?
– Some come from the USA, others from Europe (Energize, Highland Europe, Elephant – editor’s note). They are one of the biggest investors in the world.
TOP investors are always on the lookout for companies that have great potential, are growing very quickly, have a strong management team that can deliver on their forecasts, and are operating profitably. We have met all the criteria. We had a lot of interest and were able to choose the investors we liked the most.
The plans are to combine all stages of the solar power plant design and operation process on a single platform. We also plan to hire more people to create more products, increase departments in different countries.
– Have you estimated how many employees will be needed for this?
– I think we will maintain the trend of double growth per year, so I hope that in 2024 at the end we will have 400-500 employees.
We are looking for around 100 employees in Lithuania.
– You said ambitiously that your plan is to become another unicorn and you set a deadline of 2023-2026. Is this investment a big step towards that? Is there a long way to go before the unicorn?
– The goals we have set ourselves, we are deliberately pursuing them in order to reach unicorn status in 2026, but if the market continues to grow like this, I think it can be done even faster.
Source: The Delfi
