What the business is
Niko is a Mexico City company selling and installing solar panels for homes and small businesses.
The bet
Residential and small-commercial solar is underserved in Mexico, and a vertically integrated installer with in-house financing can win where fragmented installers fail.
Starting capital
$3.3M seed led by Picus Capital and 468 Capital.
How it started
Italians Edoardo Dellepiane and Raffaele Sertorio founded ghost-kitchen startup Cocinas Ocultas in Colombia and sold it to Travis Kalanick's CloudKitchens, then ran CloudKitchens operations in South Korea and Mexico. They left in March 2022 and settled on solar in Mexico, where they lived.
What happened
They found small installers did a large share of jobs with uneven quality, and slow follow-up after quotes. Niko says residential customers save 20-40% on monthly utility bills and small commercial up to 20%; it keeps a portion of the savings like a power purchase agreement, payback is about two years, and customers own the panels after seven. Investors pointed to German installer Enpal, which PitchBook says raised $957M at $2.6B.
What has to be true
High electricity tariffs, lots of sun and easier permitting made the economics attractive, per the founders
Customers were unfamiliar with solar and the installer market was fragmented and uneven
Few banks lend for small-scale solar, so in-house financing removes a barrier
Keeping a share of savings aligns Niko's revenue with customers' results
What can be applied
Where a market is fragmented and credit is scarce, owning installation, follow-up and financing can matter more than the panel technology.
Aftermath
As of 8 March 2024 Niko had just exited stealth with its seed round and sales and installations underway; TechCrunch reported no installed capacity or revenue figures and noted it is not guaranteed smooth sailing given long Mexican sales cycles.
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