Startup Deep Dive : ZunRoof — Godrej now owns most of a solar startup that loses money on every rupee it earns

ZunRoof hit $1 million in monthly bookings within four years of two IIT Kharagpur graduates starting the company out of a Gurugram flat, after assessing more than 250,000 homes and installing over 15 megawatts of rooftop solar capacity, as the founders told Energetica India and Inventiva. A decade on, the same company spent close to ₹2 to earn every ₹1 of revenue in FY23, and its revenue fell again the year after, even as its losses narrowed (Entrackr, August 2023; Entrackr, September 2025).

Through all of that, one investor kept writing cheques. The Godrej family office has now put money into ZunRoof at least three times since 2021, and its holding company, ANBG Enterprise LLP, owns more than 70% of ZunRoof’s equity as of September 2025 — up from a majority stake it already held in December 2024 (Entrackr, December 2024; Entrackr, September 2025). This is the story of how a company that once called itself India’s largest rooftop-solar installer ended up controlled by a single family office, and what its own disclosed numbers say about the economics of selling solar panel-by-panel to Indian households.

Quick facts

What they do

ZunRoof designs, installs and maintains rooftop solar systems for Indian homes and small businesses, using smartphone images and virtual-reality modelling to plan panel layouts before a crew ever visits the site, as founder Pranesh Chaudhary described to Energetica India. It operates under two consumer-facing brands: ZunRoof and ZunSolar handle the solar side — site assessment, engineering, procurement, installation and after-sales monitoring — while Zunpulse, launched in September 2020, sells IoT-enabled smart-home devices such as security sensors, video doorbells and smart bulbs that plug into the same customer relationship (TechPP, September 2020; Energetica India profile of Pranesh Chaudhary). By December 2020, the company said it had assessed over 250,000 homes, designed more than 30,000 rooftop solar systems across 75-plus cities in 12 states, and shipped 500,000-plus IoT devices (Energetica India). The pitch to a homeowner is straightforward: a professionally engineered, financed solar system that cuts a monthly electricity bill, sold by a single company rather than the unorganised local installers that have historically dominated the category.

The origin

Pranesh Chaudhary and Sushant Sachan met as students at IIT Kharagpur. Chaudhary grew up in Bihar and Sachan in Uttar Pradesh, and both had lived through the routine power cuts common to smaller Indian towns, an experience they later cited as the seed of the idea (Inventiva). After graduation, Chaudhary spent time as a management consultant at Essex Lake Group in London and at Capital One in Bengaluru, working on risk analytics, customer segmentation and operations before returning to the idea he and Sachan had discussed as students (Energetica India). Their read on the market was that India had two linked problems: unreliable, expensive grid electricity, and a residential solar industry made up of small, informal installers who left customers with poor workmanship and no real after-sales support. Rather than compete as another such installer, they set out to build what Chaudhary called “an organised, one-stop EPC that offered design, delivery and diagnostics” — a single company a homeowner could trust for the full journey from quote to decades of upkeep (Inventiva). They started ZunRoof in 2016, working out of a Gurugram flat where, in Chaudhary’s words, “we were writing codes for our app and we were the customer support staff as well” (Inventiva).

The struggle years

ZunRoof’s toughest problem was never technology — it was that almost nobody in India was used to buying rooftop solar as a considered purchase. Chaudhary told Inventiva that the company “had to educate customers rather than sell to them,” building an entirely new category of household spending from nothing. That education problem shows up directly in the company’s own disclosed numbers years later, and it never fully went away.

• FY22: ZunRoof’s revenue fell by roughly 36% year-on-year, the low point the company was recovering from when it next reported results (Entrackr, August 2023, citing the company’s FY23 filing).
• FY23: even after a 15.5% rebound to ₹29.85 crore in revenue, ZunRoof spent ₹59.75 crore against it — roughly ₹2 for every ₹1 earned — and posted a net loss of ₹29.48 crore, up 10.2% year-on-year, with an EBITDA margin of -88.21% and return on capital employed of -149.47% (Entrackr, August 2023).
• FY24: revenue declined again, down 11.46% to ₹26.43 crore, even as the company cut its net loss by 51.7% to ₹14.24 crore through cost control rather than growth (Entrackr, September 2025).
• 2025-26: headcount at the ZunRoof legal entity fell to 67 employees as of August 2025, a 24% year-on-year decline, and to 53 employees as of May 2026, a further 27% year-on-year decline, according to Tracxn’s tracking of the company — a sustained contraction in the workforce running the business (Tracxn).

None of this reads like a single dramatic near-death moment. It reads like a slower one: a company that found a real problem, built a real product around it, and then spent nine years unable to make the unit economics of installing solar panel-by-panel work at a profit, even as it kept shrinking its way toward breakeven.

The turning point

If ZunRoof had one clear high point before the slow grind of the 2020s, it was February 2020. The company said it had crossed $1 million in monthly bookings, on the back of assessments across more than 250,000 homes and installations of over 15 megawatts of solar capacity in 75-plus cities — a scale-up Chaudhary and Sachan had been building toward for four years (Inventiva). Weeks later, the same instinct for diversification led ZunRoof to launch Zunpulse, its smart-home IoT line, in September 2020, adding a second product category to sell into the same customer base just as pandemic-era demand for contactless home technology was rising (TechPP, September 2020). On one side of that moment sat four years of category-building losses and a company still teaching customers what rooftop solar even was; on the other sat a business claiming national scale, two live product lines and, within months, its first outside institutional backer in the Godrej investment office. It was the point at which ZunRoof stopped being a Gurugram experiment and started being treated, by at least one large Indian conglomerate, as a company worth owning a piece of.

The money behind it

ZunRoof’s capital history runs through two distinct phases: a long angel-funded build-up, and then a decade defined almost entirely by one repeat institutional investor.

• December 2016 — first angel round, from India- and U.S.-based executives at Facebook, Morgan Stanley and FICO, undisclosed amount (Mercom India, January 2019; thekredible).
• June 2018 — around ₹1.6-1.66 crore ($0.25 million) in angel funding led by the Intellecap Impact Investment Network (I3N), with Pradeep Tharakan of the Asian Development Bank, L’Oréal UK & Ireland managing director Vismay Sharma, Paipal Ventures’ Ajith Pai and Dalberg’s Gaurav Gupta among the investors (Entrackr, June 2018; thekredible).
• January 2019 — a third angel round of undisclosed size, adding Livspace founder Ramakant Sharma and IntelleGrow’s Arun Diaz alongside returning investors (Mercom India, January 2019).
• April 2021 — a pre-Series A of about $1.2 million from the Godrej investment office, the company’s first backing from the family office that would go on to dominate its cap table (Inc42, December 2024).
• March 2022 — a $3 million Series A led by the Godrej investment office (Entrackr, August 2023).
• December 2024 — ₹20 crore (about $2.3 million) from ANBG Enterprise LLP, the Godrej family office, with a smaller contribution from angel investor Ravindernath Chadha; shares were issued at ₹2,638 apiece, and Godrej already held a majority stake going into this round (Inc42, December 2024; Entrackr, December 2024).
• September 2025 — ₹25 crore (about $2.85 million) more, again led by ANBG Enterprise LLP, with angel investors John Diaz and S Sunil Edwards participating; shares priced at ₹5,239 apiece — roughly double the per-share price of nine months earlier — taking Godrej’s stake past 70% (Entrackr, September 2025).

Total funding is reported inconsistently across trackers — Tracxn puts it at $18 million across 11 rounds, while Entrackr’s own reporting around the September 2025 round put total funds raised at “over $15 million” — so the real figure most likely sits in the $15-18 million range (Tracxn; Entrackr, September 2025). What is not in dispute across sources is the shape of the cap table: a company built on angel money from Indian and diaspora executives has become, in practice, a Godrej family office investment that a handful of angels still hold small pieces of.

How it makes money

ZunRoof earns money the way most residential solar EPC firms do, in three overlapping streams, and its own FY23 cost disclosure shows exactly where that money goes back out.

• Solar EPC contracts: homeowners pay ZunRoof to design, procure equipment for, install and commission a rooftop solar system, with pricing built around system size in kilowatts.
• Operations and maintenance: ongoing monitoring, diagnostics and servicing of installed systems, sold as part of the same relationship rather than as a separate contract in most cases.
• Zunpulse hardware sales: smart-home IoT devices sold both to existing solar customers and as a standalone product line since September 2020 (TechPP, September 2020).

On the cost side, FY23’s ₹59.75 crore of total expenses were dominated by the physical hardware: component costs — panels, inverters, mounting structures and the like — came to ₹38.5 crore, or 64.4% of total spending, dwarfing the ₹11.1 crore spent on employee benefits and the ₹2.8 crore spent on advertising (Entrackr, August 2023). That single line item is the part outsiders tend to get wrong about a business like this: the assumption is that a solar installer’s margin problem is a marketing or sales-execution problem, when ZunRoof’s own numbers show the bulk of every rupee of cost was simply the hardware going onto the roof, priced in a market where component costs move with global silicon and steel prices that the company does not control. With components eating almost two-thirds of spending and revenue still not covering the rest, the FY23 EBITDA margin worked out to -88.21% — a business losing money on every rupee of activity before financing costs, not merely failing to scale fast enough (Entrackr, August 2023).

The numbers

• FY23 total expenses: ₹59.75 crore (~$6.2 million at $1≈₹96.0), against ₹29.85 crore of revenue (Entrackr, August 2023).
• FY23 EBITDA margin: -88.21%; return on capital employed: -149.47% (Entrackr, August 2023).
• FY24 loss reduction of 51.7% came alongside a revenue decline, indicating the improvement was driven by cost cuts rather than growth (Entrackr, September 2025).

No FY25 revenue or profit/loss figures had surfaced in company filings tracked by Entrackr or Tracxn as of this writing, so the most recent full-year figures available are FY24’s.

Where the money comes from

ZunRoof does not publish a formal revenue-by-segment breakdown, so the clearest available split is by brand and geography, drawn from the company’s own disclosures to the press.

• Core solar EPC (ZunRoof/ZunSolar): the original and larger business line — design, installation and O&M of rooftop systems, the activity behind the bulk of the ₹38.5 crore of FY23 component spend (Entrackr, August 2023).
• Zunpulse smart-home devices: a second brand launched in September 2020 that the company said grew 10-15x in its first months and shipped over 500,000 IoT devices by December 2020, though it has not disclosed a separate revenue figure for the line since (TechPP, September 2020; Energetica India).
• Geographic footprint: as of December 2020, ZunRoof said it had assessed homes and designed systems across more than 75 cities in 12 states, with an early stronghold in the Delhi NCR region — the company said it installed more solar net meters than any other single contributor in Delhi as of 2021, a claim made in the company’s own press materials that this piece has not been able to independently verify against a second source (PR Newswire; Energetica India).

The surprise, given how the company is marketed, is how little of that geographic and product spread has translated into revenue growth: FY23’s rebound gave way to a fresh decline in FY24, even with two live brands and a multi-state footprint already built out years earlier (Entrackr, August 2023; Entrackr, September 2025).

The risks

• Thin, negative unit economics: FY23’s -88.21% EBITDA margin and ₹2-spent-per-₹1-earned cost structure show a business that loses money on core operations, not just on growth investment; narrowing that gap has so far come from cutting costs and headcount rather than from revenue growth, which fell again in FY24 (Entrackr, August 2023; Entrackr, September 2025).
• Concentration in a single backer: with ANBG Enterprise LLP holding more than 70% of the company as of September 2025, ZunRoof’s ability to keep operating depends heavily on one family office’s continued willingness to fund losses, a dependency that has deepened with each of its last three rounds (Entrackr, December 2024; Entrackr, September 2025).
• Being outspent in its own category: rivals have raised far more capital to attack the same residential solar market — SolarSquare alone raised $40 million in a Series B in December 2024 and a further $53 million in a Series C, taking its total past $100 million, against ZunRoof’s reported $15-18 million lifetime total (Mercom India, December 2024; DealStreetAsia; Tracxn).

The takeaway

ZunRoof’s real lesson is not about solar, or even about India’s energy problems. It is about what happens when a company gets the hard, unglamorous part of a business right — organising a chaotic, trust-poor market into something a customer can actually buy with confidence — but never gets the hardware economics to follow. Chaudhary and Sachan solved the problem they set out to solve: they built a company customers could trust for design, installation and after-sales service in a category that used to be a coin flip. What they could not do, on the numbers the company itself has disclosed, was make that trust translate into a margin big enough to cover the cost of the panels going onto the roof. A good product and a real market are necessary. On their own, they are not sufficient — the last decade of ZunRoof’s income statement is the evidence.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded ZunRoof and when?

Pranesh Chaudhary and Sushant Sachan, both IIT Kharagpur alumni, founded ZunRoof in Gurugram in 2016, after Chaudhary had worked in consulting roles at Essex Lake Group and Capital One (Inventiva; Energetica India).

Is ZunRoof profitable?

No. ZunRoof posted a net loss of ₹29.48 crore in FY23 and ₹14.24 crore in FY24; the FY24 loss was smaller than FY23’s but came alongside a decline in revenue, not an increase (Entrackr, August 2023; Entrackr, September 2025).

Who owns ZunRoof now?

The Godrej family office, through ANBG Enterprise LLP, is the majority shareholder, holding more than 70% of the company as of September 2025 after investing in the business at least four times since April 2021 (Entrackr, December 2024; Entrackr, September 2025).

How much funding has ZunRoof raised in total?

Reports vary: Tracxn puts total funding at $18 million across 11 rounds, while Entrackr’s coverage of the September 2025 round described total funds raised as “over $15 million” — so the reported range is roughly $15-18 million (Tracxn; Entrackr, September 2025).

What is Zunpulse and how does it relate to ZunRoof?

Zunpulse is ZunRoof’s IoT smart-home device brand, launched in September 2020, selling products such as smart security sensors, video doorbells and smart bulbs to both existing solar customers and new buyers (TechPP, September 2020; Energetica India).

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Entrackr, “Zunroof spent Rs 60 Cr to make Rs 30 Cr in FY23,” August 2023
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Godrej increases stake in Zunroof with fresh investment,” December 2024
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Zunroof secures fresh funds from Godrej,” September 2025
• Entrackr, “Rooftop solar installation startup ZunRoof bags Rs 1.6 Cr from clutch of angels,” June 2018
• Inc42, “ZunRoof Bags INR 20 Cr To Offer Rooftop Solar Solutions,” December 2024
• Mercom India, “Rooftop Solar Company ZunRoof Raises Third Round of Angel Funding,” January 2019
• Tracxn, ZunRoof company profile (funding, valuation, employee count), accessed September 2026
• Inventiva, “The Turning Point: Why These Friends Launched Solar Energy Solutions Startup ZunRoof”
• Energetica India, profile/interview with Pranesh Chaudhary, Founder & CEO, ZunRoof
• TechPP, “ZunRoof forays into Smart Home category with the launch of 8 smart Zunpulse devices,” September 2020
• Mercom India, “Residential Solar Company SolarSquare Raises $40 Million in Series B Funding,” December 2024
• DealStreetAsia, “Indian solar startup SolarSquare bags $53m in B Capital-led round”
• PR Newswire, “ZunRoof, solar startup based in Gurugram, is contributing up to 15% of all the solar net meters installed in Delhi”

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