#69 Aether
All-in-one platform powering widespread solar installations
Read time: 5 minutes
Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.
This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.
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Today we’ll distill a company that’s making solar installation bottlenecks and costs disappear with their end-to-end software that makes life 10X easier for solar installers: Aether 🇺🇸🇫🇷
Full disclosure: Aether sponsored this edition, which helps keep this newsletter going. I only partner with companies I genuinely believe are worth your time to learn about, and I've covered them with the same editorial standards as always.
What Problem Does Aether Tackle❓
Aether addresses critical inefficiencies in the solar installation industry that are preventing the widespread adoption of rooftop solar energy:
1. Excessive Costs: The biggest barrier to solar adoption isn't the hardware, it's the "soft costs" that make up over 60% of a typical solar installation (design, analysis, project management, etc.). Around $5,000 to $7,000 in added soft costs for a typical solar rooftop project.
2. Inefficient Design and Proposals: Traditional solar design processes are labor-intensive and slow. Installers often need to conduct site visits and manually create system layouts, spending hours generating proposals for each potential customer.
3. Fragmented and Outdated Sales Workflows: Solar installers use outdated sales processes, slow design workflows, and generic CRMs that weren't built for their specific sector. Most installers constantly switch between different software tools.
4. Limited Scalability: The manual nature of design work, proposal generation, and project management creates a direct correlation between growth and staffing costs, limiting profitability and expansion potential.
Despite growing demand and improving technology, the solar industry remains constrained by operational inefficiencies.
Product / Service 📦
That's where Aether comes in! They offer an AI-powered end-to-end platform for rooftop solar installers that combines computer vision, LLMs and agents to automate the entire solar workflow. Key features?
AI-powered 3D Design Engine: Installers enter a property address and instantly receive a full rooftop solar panel system layout, eliminating the need for manual design work and site visits.
Unified Management: Aether combines targeting, design, proposals with certified production estimates, CRM and project management into one system, replacing multiple fragmented tools that solar installers typically juggle between.
Workflow Builder: Contractors can design custom automations without writing code. Auto-assign leads based on territory or project type. Notify production teams when jobs are approved. Schedule site visits automatically after e-signature.
24/7 AI Automation: Sector-trained agents create branded proposals, follow up with leads, schedule appointments, and automate handoffs from sales to operations without coding, saving 2+ hours per sales rep per day.
Further Use Cases: Their platform can also be used in related verticals like roofing and heat pump installation. All helping to make houses more efficient and sustainable.
Market 🌐
The global residential solar installation market alone is projected to reach $293 billion by 2030. If we also add heat pumps, HVAC, roofing, etc. the number gets much bigger. All the subsidies and regulations across the EU to make homes more sustainable is increasing this demand for contractors’ work even more.
Other Key Players
Aurora Solar 🇺🇸: Solar software to design and sell advanced PV systems, used by installers to create over 100,000 PV designs every week.
OpenSolar 🇦🇺: Free solar software that provides solar design accuracy, customer proposals and end-to-end tools to manage and grow solar businesses.
Aether replaces the entire fragmented tech stack (not just a few pieces) with one AI-driven platform, their in-house models run on several image sources and they have established a strong EU and US presence.
Founding Story 🦄
Aether, was founded in 2023 by Shelby Bons and Zayne Sagar. They met at UC Berkeley and share a strong engineering expertise and commitment to climate action.
Driven by the belief that high costs and inefficiencies plaguing the rooftop solar industry significantly hinder widespread adoption, they leveraged their backgrounds in engineering, product management, and machine learning to build an all-in-one platform for solar installers.
In winter 2024 they were accepted into Y combinator and since then they’ve raised a seed round and their platform has helped power 100,000+ projects over the last 4 months alone.
Despite having its roots in the US and France, their platform is already present in several countries across North America and Western Europe.
Top Impact Stats 📈
1. 3x faster sales cycles. Contractors can go from quote to close in days instead of weeks, dramatically increasing solar installation velocity.
2. Up to 50% reduction in Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC), making solar more economically viable.
3. Significant reduction in transportation emissions through remote design and quoting capabilities.
Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:
Scale and optimize your climate business: I build low-code automation systems for climate companies so they can free up time to scale their revenues and their climate impact.
Give visibility to your climate company: Get your company in front of an audience of thousands of climate players and enthusiasts by sponsoring newsletter issues and LinkedIn posts.
Aether: the AI-powered front-office platform for contractors in Solar, Roofing, HVAC, Landscaping and Fire Mitigation.
Contact info: Zayne (zsagar@aetherenergy.me) & Thomas (tsalome@aetherenergy.me)
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Super interesting!!