Oriano Solar, a Mumbai-based startup that specialises in turnkey solar solutions, has raised Series A funding worth $3 million (around Rs 20 crore) from Samridhi Fund, which is managed by SIDBI Venture Capital Ltd, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI).
The company will use the fresh capital to expand its project management and business development teams in addition to establishing offices across India, Sachin Jain co-founder and CEO of Oriano Solar, told VCCircle.
Oriano was founded by Jain along with Yeshwant Rao and Sameer Shah in June 2015. Oriano is a spin-off of CCL Opto Electronics Pvt. Ltd., which provides fibre optic components for the telecom industry in India.
Oriano Solar specialises in turnkey solar EPC (engineering, procurement and construction management) for utility-scale solar power plants, solar farms and rooftops. The company claims to have executed over 75 MW of solar projects in addition to installing over 10 MW of rooftops for private companies across 6 states.
“In the last one year, we have grown almost 10 times from less than Rs 5 crore revenues to over Rs 50 crore revenues. We have completed more than 35 projects across seven states in India,†Shah said.
Orinao’s clients include Amway, Honda, Atria Power, SunEdison, Cipla, HPCL, HAL and Tata Communications.
The company aims to hit revenues of Rs 200 crore in FY2017-18.
The development was first reported by The Times of India.
Samridhi Fund is a social venture capital fund investing in social enterprises across eight low-income states of India. The Rs 430 crore fund is set up with contributions from SIDBI, Department for International Development (DFID), Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) and United India Insurance Company Ltd (UIIC).
In the renewable energy sector, Clean Max Enviro Energy Solutions Pvt. Ltd, a renewable energy service company, received an investment commitment of $15 million (Rs 100 crore) through compulsory convertible debentures from International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private-sector investment arm of the World Bank recently.
IFC last year committed up to $125 million (Rs 840 crore) in Hero Future Energies Pvt. Ltd.
Last year, IFC also decided to facilitate debt funding worth around $177 million to Ostro Energy Pvt. Ltd, a renewable energy platform backed by emerging markets-focused private equity major Actis.
India’s renewable energy sector has seen a lot of activity over the past couple of years after the government set ambitious capacity addition targets. The government aims to achieve 175 GW of renewable power generation capacity by 2022. This includes 100 GW of solar and 60 GW of wind power capacity. India’s renewable energy capacity is currently around 44 GW.
Like this report? Sign up for our daily newsletter to get our top reports.