Aether Energy recently launched!
"AI design and workflow software for solar installers."
Aether offers an AI-powered end-to-end platform for rooftop solar installers. Combining advancements in computer vision/lidar and LLMs to bring a unique workflow automation tool for solar installers worldwide.
Founded by Zayne Sagar & Shelby Bons
Sneak peek at Aether ⤵️
❌ The Problem:
The biggest problem in US rooftop solar is still solar soft costs. These are non-hardware costs associated with a solar project, and they amount to north of 60% of the total solar cost of an installed system! If you reduce this you create more demand for rooftop solar in the market = better outcome for our planet.
Contributors to high soft costs:
- PV CAD Design teams still manually build rooftop PV site designs. This is time-consuming and prone to lots of errors. Mistakes here mean re-doing plansets and permitting which can cost $1k - $2k extra.
- Almost all solar design tools are inaccurate in production and consumption modeling. This is what tells rooftop owners “Is this the right investment for me?” Most solar tools were built as a sidekick for sales reps, with just enough basic estimates to sell a solar proposal. Consumers are smarter now and recent legal litigations are forcing better modeling to be done when selling solar.
- Dependency on multiple platforms: Most solar companies use a software stack of 6 - 10 point solutions. Collectively the solution is dumb and creates chaotic workflows where deals get lost and project delays happen a lot. This is very expensive.
- Lack of project visibility across teams causing lost sales deals, and project delays
They estimate $5k to $ 7k added soft costs for a typical rooftop project occurring because of the above.
✅ Solution:
Aether is built to streamline the rooftop solar workflow end to end. Think Procore or Veeva but for Solar with an AI twist.
With Aether, solar companies can rapidly generate PV site designs, sell using a beautiful PV proposal, and then manage it to installation in one simplified workflow.
Aether is made up of hubs that help specific roles in a solar installation company do their job, but more importantly, collaborate with other teams as needed with the help of AI.
The startup's two core innovations:
- They built an in-house computer vision model.
- They also decided to build a mini fine-tuned model for solar. Being trained on items such as system production data, vision model outputs, etc.
The result is a unified AI platform to streamline solar with solar agents.
Aether Platform - Sneak Peek ⤵️
💲Opportunity: Aether will be a big player in the young and emerging Solar software vertical, which has a projected 20B Global TAM up for grabs by 2025.
💲Early adopter discount: Aether is giving solar installers 50% off whatever design tool they currently pay for.
Aether automates the boring stuff for solar installers using AI.
