Startup Deep Dive : Amplus Solar — sold power not panels, then vanished into a bigger brand

In April 2019, a Malaysian government-owned oil and gas company agreed to pay a reported Rs 2,700 crore for 100% of an Indian rooftop-solar business that, five years earlier, was running on roughly Rs 2 crore borrowed from friends and family (iamRenew, April 2019; EQ International, 2017). The buyer was Petroliam Nasional Berhad, better known as Petronas. The company it bought was Amplus Energy Solutions, trading as Amplus Solar, which never manufactured a panel or sold a single watt-peak of equipment — it sold electricity, on rooftops it owned, under contracts that ran for decades.

Six years after that deal closed, the contradiction sharpened further: the company Petronas paid hundreds of millions of dollars for no longer exists under its own name. In May 2025, Amplus Solar’s roughly 2.4 GW of Indian distributed-energy assets and its brand were folded into Gentari, Petronas’s clean-energy arm, and the founder who built the business had already left three years earlier to start something else (Gentari, 5 May 2025; pv magazine India, 5 May 2025; Wikipedia, accessed September 2026). This is the story of how a business built on selling power instead of hardware scaled fast enough to attract a state oil major, and how being bought by one meant its own name eventually stopped mattering.

Quick facts

What they do

Amplus Solar builds, owns and operates solar power plants on the rooftops and premises of commercial and industrial customers, then sells them the electricity those plants generate under long-term power purchase agreements, rather than selling them the panels or the project. It also develops ground-mounted and, more recently, open-access solar plants that supply the same category of customer over the grid rather than from their own roof.

• Customer base: over 150 commercial and industrial customers across more than 200 locations in India as of 2019, spanning automotive, industrial, consumer/retail, technology and hospitality sectors (Petronas, April 2019; CARE Ratings, March 2026)
• Core model: Renewable Energy Service Company (RESCO)/OpEx structure — the developer funds 100% of the upfront capital, and the client pays only for the power consumed (EQ International, 2017)
• Contract structure: build-own-operate-transfer (BOOT), with the plant transferred to the customer once the PPA term (typically 10-25 years) ends (CARE Ratings, March 2024 and March 2026)
• Geography: operations concentrated in India, with the wider Amplus/M+ platform having also served sites in the Middle East and South East Asia as of 2019 (Mercom India, April 2019)

The pitch to a factory or a hotel chain is simple: it gets electricity cheaper than the state distribution company charges industrial users, with no capital outlay and no operating risk, because Amplus (now Gentari) carries the credit and performance risk on the asset for the life of the contract.

The origin

Sanjeev Aggarwal, an engineer from Jamia Millia Islamia with a management degree from IIM Ahmedabad, spent the years before Amplus at AES India, the local arm of the American power company AES Corporation, where he worked on the development of a 1,200 MW coal-based power plant with a captive coal mine in Chhattisgarh (Wikipedia, accessed September 2026). He left AES in March 2010, and by his own account in a later interview, the plan afterwards was not solar at all — it was hydrocarbons (EQ International, 2017).

Aggarwal tried to bid for oil and gas exploration blocks and to develop a captive gas-based power project once he was out on his own. Neither worked. Coal and gas allocations in India had turned into a bureaucratic minefield by 2010, and the search for a hydrocarbon-based business, Aggarwal has said, nearly ran him into insolvency before he had even started (Wikipedia, accessed September 2026). The pivot to solar came out of that failure rather than any grand plan: distributed power for large electricity users looked like the one part of India’s energy sector where a small outfit could compete against incumbents, provided it structured the deal so the customer never had to put capital at risk. That became Amplus’s founding insight — sell the electricity, not the equipment, and let the developer carry both the investment and the operating risk. Amplus signed its first rooftop solar contract, a 100 kW installation, in November 2013, and the group’s Singapore-domiciled holding entity, Amplus Energy Solutions Pte Ltd, was formally established that same year, according to Petronas’s own 2019 acquisition announcement (Petronas, April 2019).

The struggle years

The gap between Aggarwal leaving AES in March 2010 and Amplus signing its first contract in November 2013 was not a smooth runway — it was more than three years of trying and failing to get a hydrocarbon business off the ground, a stretch Aggarwal has described as coming close to financial ruin (Wikipedia, accessed September 2026). Even after the pivot to rooftop solar, the company spent its early years capital-starved: it took until 2014 for Aggarwal to raise roughly Rs 2 crore from friends and family, money that had to fund site assessments, engineering and the first small round of installations before any institutional investor would look at the business (EQ International, 2017).

That friends-and-family round was not a war chest — it was survival capital for a company trying to prove a model (developer-funded solar with a decade-plus payback) to customers who had never heard of a RESCO structure and to banks unwilling to lend against contracts with unrated corporate off-takers. Amplus spent roughly a year and a half operating on that capital before institutional money arrived, a period during which the entire model rested on winning enough small commercial contracts to keep the company solvent while it waited for a partner able to fund plants at scale.

The turning point

The turning point was April 2019, when Petronas agreed to buy 100% of Amplus Energy Solutions from I Squared Capital, the infrastructure investor that had backed the company since 2015, in a deal reported at roughly Rs 2,700 crore, or about $390-391 million (iamRenew, April 2019; pv-tech, citing Livemint, April 2019). Before the deal, Amplus was a private, PE-backed developer with a reported 500 MW-plus portfolio of operating and under-construction solar assets across more than 200 sites in India, the Middle East and South East Asia, serving over 150 commercial and industrial customers (Petronas, April 2019; Mercom India, April 2019). Under I Squared Capital’s ownership since 2015, the company said it had grown at average annual rates of over 400% (Petronas, April 2019; PV Tech, April 2019).

After the deal, Amplus stopped being an independently owned, exit-seeking portfolio company and became a wholly captive platform inside a state-owned oil major’s renewable energy ambitions. The capacity kept growing under the new owner — the group reported around 1.1 GW operational and roughly 1.9 GW total (including under-construction and development-stage projects) as of December 2023, rising further to more than 2.4 GW of operational and under-construction distributed assets by May 2025 (CARE Ratings, March 2024; Gentari, 5 May 2025). But the change of hands also set the clock on the Amplus name itself: once folded into Petronas’s dedicated clean-energy vertical, Gentari, the acquisition was no longer a funding event for an independent company — it was the point at which Amplus’s future stopped being its own to decide.

The money behind it

• 2014, friends and family: roughly Rs 2 crore raised by founder Sanjeev Aggarwal to fund the company’s earliest rooftop projects (EQ International, 2017)
• April 2015, I Squared Capital: a reported $150 million equity investment from the New York-headquartered infrastructure investor, which took what was reported at the time as a roughly 90% stake and funded Amplus’s expansion into a multi-hundred-megawatt platform (EQ International, 2017; PV Tech, April 2019)
• April 2019, Petronas acquisition: Petronas agreed to buy I Squared Capital’s full stake — 100% of Amplus Energy Solutions Pte Ltd — for a reported Rs 2,700 crore (~$391 million), in what Petronas called its first international solar venture (iamRenew, April 2019; pv-tech, April 2019; Wikipedia, accessed September 2026)
• 2022, Gentari formed: Petronas launched Gentari Sdn Bhd as a wholly owned subsidiary dedicated to renewable energy, hydrogen and green mobility, positioning it as the vehicle for the group’s clean-energy ambitions, including its stake in Amplus (The Malaysian Reserve, June 2022; ICRA, February 2025)
• 2023, ownership consolidated under Gentari: the Amplus group’s ownership was placed under Gentari, which in turn is a 100% subsidiary of Petronas — a structure confirmed in subsequent credit-rating disclosures on Amplus operating entities (CARE Ratings, March 2024; ICRA, February 2025)
• Total disclosed capital raised: $150 million in primary equity from I Squared Capital (2015) plus the roughly $391 million paid by Petronas to buy out that stake in 2019 — no further external primary funding round has been publicly reported since, as the company has operated as a wholly owned subsidiary since 2019
• Latest valuation marker: the last arm’s-length transaction value on record remains the April 2019 buyout, at a reported Rs 2,700 crore (~$391 million) for the entire company; no subsequent valuation event has been disclosed because Amplus has not raised external capital since

How it makes money

Amplus does not sell equipment, EPC contracts or one-time installations. Its revenue is metered electricity, billed monthly over a PPA that typically runs 10 to 25 years, at tariffs set below what the customer would otherwise pay the local electricity distribution company for industrial power (CARE Ratings, March 2026). The company’s most recent rated PPA book carries a capacity-weighted average tariff of about Rs 4.4 per unit, with a mix of fixed-rate (with or without annual escalation) and grid-linked structures depending on the contract (CARE Ratings, March 2026).

• Money in: metered kWh sold to the customer at the contracted PPA tariff, for the life of the agreement
• Money out: interest and principal on project debt (raised against each special-purpose vehicle that owns a cluster of plants), operations and maintenance costs, and depreciation on the solar assets
• Where the margin sits: in the spread between the fixed or semi-fixed PPA tariff and the actual cost of generation — which is why plant load factor (PLF) and generation performance, not customer acquisition, are the main swing factors in profitability
• Leverage: individual rated operating entities carry overall gearing in the range of 0.5x-0.7x on a standalone basis, while the wider 10-entity “cash pooling” portfolio carried total debt of roughly 9.8 times operating profit (OPBDIT) in CY23, reflecting how debt-funded the model is (CARE Ratings, March 2024; ICRA, February 2025)
• What people get wrong: Amplus is frequently described as a solar installer or EPC company, but it is structurally closer to a regulated-utility-style asset owner — it retains ownership of the plant and the generation risk under a BOOT contract, and only transfers the asset to the customer once the PPA term expires (CARE Ratings, March 2024)

The numbers

Amplus’s Singapore-incorporated group holding company, Amplus Energy Solutions Pte Ltd, does not file separate public accounts in India, so there is no single consolidated revenue line for the whole platform. The most reliable, audited public window into its unit economics comes from credit-rating disclosures on its rated operating subsidiaries. Amplus Solar Power Private Limited (ASPPL) — one of the group’s operating entities, running an 84.5 MW rooftop portfolio as of December 2025 — has published four consecutive years of audited results through CARE Ratings:

• Source: CARE Ratings press releases on Amplus Solar Power Private Limited, dated 14 March 2024 (CY21-CY22 figures) and 23 March 2026 (CY23-CY24 figures), both marked audited
• ASPPL has been loss-making at the PAT line in every disclosed year, consistent with a young, debt-funded infrastructure asset where depreciation and interest expense outweigh operating cash flow in the early years of a plant’s life
• A separate, broader “cash pooling” consolidation of 10 Amplus operating SPVs (aggregate ~173 MW) reported by ICRA showed operating income of Rs 46.3 crore (CY22) rising to Rs 67.4 crore (CY23), with PAT of -Rs 6.9 crore and -Rs 14.1 crore respectively — a different, larger slice of the group, but the same pattern of top-line growth alongside continuing net losses (ICRA, February 2025)
• Total debt/EBITDA at ASPPL stood at 4.9x as of December 2024, described by CARE Ratings as leveraged, though it is expected to ease toward roughly 4.0x over the following two years (CARE Ratings, March 2026)

Where the money comes from

Within its rated rooftop portfolio, Amplus is geographically concentrated in a handful of Indian states, and its customer base is skewed toward a small number of industries rather than spread evenly across the economy.

• Geographic split (ASPPL portfolio, CARE Ratings, March 2026): Maharashtra ~29%, Uttar Pradesh ~20%, Haryana ~12%, with the balance spread across Karnataka, Goa, Kerala and other states
• Sector split of off-takers (same portfolio): automobile ~27%, industrial ~24%, consumer/retail ~22%, technology ~8%, with the rest in hospitality and other sectors
• Customer concentration: as of the group’s 2024 disclosures, roughly 45% of total contracted capacity sat with the top 10 off-takers, meaning the loss of a handful of large accounts would materially affect revenue (CARE Ratings, March 2024)
• The surprise: the business that made Amplus’s name — rooftop solar on a customer’s own premises — is no longer where the group’s growth is concentrated. Since the 2023 integration into Gentari, the platform’s expansion has leaned increasingly on utility-scale, grid-connected open-access plants (such as a 360 MWp plant at Bikaner, Rajasthan, and a 150 MWp open-access plant in Maharashtra) that supply the same category of C&I customer over the grid rather than from their own rooftop, pushing Gentari’s total India renewable and storage capacity to about 7.5 GW, alongside roughly 750 operational and under-construction plants across 36 states and union territories (Gentari, accessed September 2026)

The risks

• Regulatory risk on rooftop and open-access rules: Amplus’s entire commercial case rests on paying a lower tariff than the grid. State-level changes to rooftop solar, net-metering or open-access regulations can alter that landed-cost advantage on a prospective basis, directly hitting the economics of existing contracts (CARE Ratings, March 2024 and March 2026)
• Generation and weather risk: because most contracts carry a single-part, generation-linked tariff, revenue moves directly with how much electricity a plant actually produces. ASPPL’s capacity utilisation factor came in at 12.5% in CY25, just under the portfolio’s own P-90 design estimate of 12.6%, after earlier years were hit by an extended monsoon and winter fog affecting panel output (CARE Ratings, March 2026; ICRA, February 2025)
• Interest-rate risk on floating debt against fixed revenue: project loans are priced off the marginal cost of funds-based lending rate (MCLR) and reset periodically, while most PPA tariffs are fixed for the life of the contract — so a rise in borrowing costs compresses margins with no matching increase in revenue (CARE Ratings, March 2024 and March 2026)
• Leverage and counterparty risk: ASPPL’s total debt stood at 4.9 times EBITDA as of December 2024, and collection efficiency across the wider cash-pooling portfolio slipped from about 97% in CY23 to about 93% in the first ten months of CY24, showing that even investment-grade-rated off-takers can slow payments (ICRA, February 2025)
• Dependence on parent support: rating agencies explicitly list a “material reduction in PETRONAS’ stake” or any weakening of parental support as a factor that would trigger a downgrade, meaning Amplus’s credit profile is underwritten as much by its Malaysian state-owned parent’s balance sheet as by its own project cash flows (CARE Ratings, March 2024)

The takeaway

Amplus’s model proved a specific point: you can scale an infrastructure-heavy business without owning much infrastructure risk yourself, as long as you can convince someone else’s balance sheet — first friends and family, then a private equity infrastructure fund, then a state oil major — to fund the assets while you keep the contracts, the operating expertise and the customer relationships. That worked well enough to take a company from Rs 2 crore of borrowed capital in 2014 to a reported Rs 2,700 crore sale five years later. But the same structure that made Amplus attractive to acquire also made its independent identity dispensable. Once a company’s growth depends entirely on a parent’s willingness to keep funding it, that parent eventually gets to decide whether the name survives the next phase of strategy — and in Amplus’s case, in May 2025, it did not.

Frequently asked questions

What did Amplus Solar do?

It built, owned and operated rooftop and ground-mounted solar power plants for commercial and industrial customers in India, selling them electricity under long-term power purchase agreements rather than selling them equipment or EPC services (Petronas, April 2019; CARE Ratings, March 2024).

Who founded Amplus Solar, and is he still involved?

Sanjeev Aggarwal founded the company in 2010 after leaving AES India, and led it through its early rooftop contracts, its 2015 investment from I Squared Capital and its 2019 sale to Petronas. He exited Amplus in 2022 and is now Executive Chairman at Hexa Climate, a separate renewable energy platform he founded (Wikipedia, accessed September 2026; Energetica India, July 2026).

How much did Petronas pay for Amplus?

Petronas agreed in April 2019 to buy 100% of Amplus Energy Solutions from I Squared Capital in a deal reported at roughly Rs 2,700 crore, or about $390-391 million; the exact price was not officially disclosed by either party (iamRenew, April 2019; pv-tech, citing Livemint, April 2019).

Is Amplus Solar still called Amplus?

No. In May 2025, Petronas’s clean-energy arm Gentari integrated the Amplus Solar brand and its roughly 2.4 GW of distributed energy assets into the unified Gentari brand in India, and the platform now operates as Gentari rather than under the Amplus name (Gentari, 5 May 2025; pv magazine India, 5 May 2025).

Is Amplus Solar profitable?

Not at the level of its disclosed operating entities. Amplus Solar Power Private Limited, one of the group’s rated subsidiaries, reported losses after tax in every year from CY21 to CY24, ranging from about Rs 9.6 crore to Rs 18 crore, consistent with a debt-funded infrastructure business still working through depreciation and interest costs on its asset base (CARE Ratings, March 2024 and March 2026).

Sources

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

• PETRONAS, “PETRONAS to Acquire Asia’s Leading Distributed Energy Solutions Provider”, April 2019
• Mercom India, “Malaysia’s PETRONAS Acquires Singapore’s Distributed Solar Company Amplus Energy”, April 2019
• pv magazine International, “Petronas jumps into PV market with Amplus acquisition”, April 2019
• PV Tech, “Oil giant Petronas to buy C&I solar specialist Amplus”, April 2019 (citing Livemint)
• iamRenew, “Petronas Acquires Amplus Energy in Rs 2700 crore deal”, April 2019
• EQ International (eqmagpro.com), “Amplus Energy: cutting out the middleman”, 2017
• iamRenew, “Sanjeev Aggarwal, CEO of Amplus Solar, says Solar Power is becoming Democratised”, accessed September 2026
• Wikipedia, “Sanjeev Aggarwal”, accessed September 2026
• Energetica India, “Sanjeev Aggarwal, Founder and Executive Chairman at Hexa Climate”, July 2026
• The Malaysian Reserve, “Petronas rolls out Gentari to accelerate clean energy adoption, commercialisation”, June 2022
• CARE Ratings, Press Release, “Amplus Solar Power Private Limited”, 14 March 2024
• CARE Ratings, Press Release, “Amplus Solar Power Private Limited”, 23 March 2026
• ICRA, “Amplus Solar Power MH Private Limited: Rating reaffirmed”, 11 February 2025
• Gentari, “Amplus Solar rebrands to Gentari — a unified step forward to drive next phase of clean energy growth”, 5 May 2025
• pv magazine India, “Amplus Solar rebrands to Gentari”, 5 May 2025
• Gentari, “Amplus” company page, accessed September 2026

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