Startup Deep Dive : SolarSquare — a profitable business, walked away from, to build a 70 million one

In 2020, the founders of SolarSquare walked away from a profitable, bootstrapped business doing about ₹100 crore in annual revenue to chase a market that barely existed on paper: rooftop solar for Indian homes. Six years on, that bet is worth an estimated $470 million (₹4,500 crore, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics), according to Entrackr’s reading of the company’s post-Series C cap table, even as the underlying business lost ₹37 crore in the financial year ending March 2025.

SolarSquare Energy Private Limited, incorporated in Mumbai on 8 May 2015 (CIN U40104MH2015PTC264250, per Tracxn), now says it has powered close to 50,000 homes and about 400 housing societies across 29 cities in nine states, with more than 150 megawatts installed, as reported by TechCrunch in May 2026 citing company figures. The gap between a nine-figure valuation and a business still bleeding cash on paper is the real story here — and it runs through a pivot, a funding sprint, and a set of numbers that do not fully agree with each other depending on who is counting.

Quick facts

What they do

SolarSquare sells rooftop solar as a service to Indian households and housing societies, not just as equipment. It handles site assessment, system design, procurement of panels and inverters, installation, connection to the local discom’s net-metering setup, financing tie-ups so a homeowner does not have to pay the full cost upfront, and after-sales maintenance. The pitch to a homeowner is that a rooftop system pays for itself out of the electricity bill it eliminates, with the company standing behind the design and the paperwork that individual electricians and small installers historically got wrong. A smaller commercial arm still serves enterprise clients, a hangover from the company’s original business.

The origin

Neeraj Jain and Nikhil Nahar registered SolarSquare in Mumbai in May 2015, initially building custom, large-scale solar installations for corporate clients — Fortune 500-scale accounts, according to The Better India’s 2024 account of the company’s history. Jain, an IIT Bombay graduate who had worked in finance at Deutsche Bank, has said his conviction was straightforward: solar was already the cheapest and most abundant source of energy available, and India’s rooftops were an almost entirely untapped asset, as he told Entrepreneur India. The commercial-and-industrial (C&I) business worked. By 2020 it was profitable and bootstrapped, turning over roughly ₹100 crore a year, per The Better India. But the founders concluded that the real prize — millions of individual homes, not a few hundred large corporate roofs — was a business they had not yet built, and one that almost no one had built well in India at the time.

The struggle years

The first real setback was not a failure so much as a deliberate act of self-sabotage: in 2020, the founders chose to redirect a profitable, cash-generative company toward an unproven consumer market. Shreya Mishra, an IIT Bombay alumna who had earlier built and exited the fashion-rental startup Flyrobe in 2019 and carried consulting experience from Boston Consulting Group, joined as co-founder and CEO to lead that shift. By her own account, via Entrepreneur India, the early residential effort in 2020 was “just the two of us and a handful of key hires” trying to work out whether homeowners would actually buy solar the way the founders believed they would. There was no guarantee the C&I profits would translate into a working consumer model, and the company effectively gave up a known, working revenue line to find out.

The second setback showed up in the books years later, once the residential bet had scaled. SolarSquare’s operating revenue grew a healthy 63.5% to ₹175 crore in FY24 from ₹107 crore in FY23, but its net loss surged 2.3 times to ₹69 crore over the same period, according to Entrackr’s Fintrackr analysis of the company’s RoC filings. The FY24 numbers were unsparing: an EBITDA margin of -35.96%, a return on capital employed of -112.85%, and unit economics that Entrackr summed up as spending ₹1.31 to earn every ₹1 of revenue. Growth was real. So was the cash burn required to buy it.

The turning point

The clearest before-and-after in SolarSquare’s history is the 2020 pivot itself, because the numbers on each side are unusually well documented. Before it: a profitable, self-funded commercial solar contractor doing about ₹100 crore in annual revenue, according to The Better India, with no institutional capital and no consumer brand. After it: a company that raised its first outside capital — a ₹30 crore seed round led by Good Capital in June 2022, per Entrackr’s reporting on the subsequent Series A — specifically to build the residential business from close to zero, expanding from a standing start to, within roughly two years, “close to 5,000 homes” solarised by the time of its Series A in November 2022, per Entrackr. The company chose to shrink its certainty in exchange for a shot at a much larger, then-unorganised market — and the outside capital that followed only came because the early residential numbers, however small, were moving in the right direction.

The money behind it

SolarSquare has now raised roughly $114 million (~₹1,094 crore) across five rounds, according to Tracxn’s company profile (as of June 2026). The sequence, as reported by Entrackr, Business Standard and YourStory:

• Seed, June 2022: ₹30 crore, led by Good Capital, with Lowercarbon Capital, Symphony Asia, Rainmatter, Better Capital and GoMassive participating (Entrackr).
• Series A, November 2022: ₹100 crore (~$12 million), led by Elevation Capital (₹50 crore), with Lowercarbon Capital (₹17.23 crore) and existing backers Good Capital and Rainmatter; post-money valuation of about ₹420 crore (~$52 million) (Entrackr).
• Series B, in two tranches (May and December 2024): an initial ₹35.44 crore (~$4.2 million) in May 2024 from Zerodha Technology, Gruhas Proptech, Lowercarbon and Good Capital (Inc42; Business Standard), followed by the main close in December 2024 led by Lightspeed (₹121.37 crore, ~$14.2 million), with Lowercarbon (₹69 crore), Energy Access Acceleration (₹52 crore) and Elevation Capital (₹48.55 crore); $40 million in total, at a post-money valuation of about ₹1,772 crore (~$209 million) (Entrackr’s decoding of the round; YourStory).
• Series C, closed around 16 June 2026: $53 million led by B Capital (~$30 million), with Lightspeed, Elevation Capital, Lowercarbon, Rainmatter, Good Capital and cricketer MS Dhoni’s family office Midas Deals also participating; post-money valuation of about $470 million (~₹4,500 crore), roughly double the Series B mark (Entrackr; TechCrunch, which had reported the round in talks at a $450-500 million valuation in May 2026).

• What Elevation Capital changed: came in at Series A (2022) and stayed through every subsequent round; by the Series C cap table it held about 15.2%, among the largest external stakes (Entrackr).
• What Lightspeed changed: entered at Series B (2024) as lead investor, anchoring the round that took the company past a $200 million valuation for the first time (Entrackr; Business Standard).
• What Lowercarbon Capital changed: present from the seed round, it ended up the largest single external shareholder at roughly 16.1% post-Series C, reflecting an early, sustained bet on Indian residential solar (Entrackr).

Successive rounds have diluted the founders fast: their combined stake fell from about 38.85% after the Series B allotment to about 27.54% after Series C, in under two years, per Entrackr’s decoding pieces on both rounds.

How it makes money

SolarSquare’s revenue is overwhelmingly a hardware-and-installation business today, not a services or financing business, based on its FY24 RoC filings as reported by Entrackr:

• Product sales: ₹173 crore in FY24, up 66.35% year-on-year — the bulk of revenue, coming from selling and installing solar panels, inverters and balance-of-system equipment (Entrackr).
• Services: just ₹2 crore in FY24, down 33.33% year-on-year — a thin slice covering maintenance and related work (Entrackr).
• Other income: about ₹3 crore from interest and investment gains in FY24 (Entrackr).

• Money in: upfront or financed payment from the homeowner or housing society for a fully installed system, plus a smaller enterprise contract line.
• Costs out: material costs of ₹134 crore dominated FY24 spending, with employee costs of ₹37 crore (more than doubling year-on-year) and finance/rental costs of ₹8 crore (Entrackr).
• Where the margin sits, and what people get wrong: the company is often described as a fintech-enabled solar platform because it arranges financing for buyers, but the RoC numbers show financing and services are a rounding error next to hardware sales — the business currently behaves like a capital-intensive EPC contractor with a consumer brand on top, not an asset-light platform.
• Financing ambitions: in 2022, around its Series A, the company said it planned to invest in an in-house NBFC to speed up loan approvals for buyers, per YourStory’s reporting at the time — a company-stated plan rather than a confirmed current business line.

The numbers

Figures below are operating revenue and net profit/loss in ₹ crore, as reported by Entrackr’s Fintrackr from the company’s RoC filings, and by Inc42 for FY23.

• FY23 to FY24: revenue up 63.5%, but the loss more than doubled (2.3x) — growth outpaced control of costs (Entrackr/Inc42).
• FY24 to FY25: revenue roughly doubled to ₹355 crore, while the loss narrowed 46% to ₹37 crore — the first year the loss line moved in the opposite direction to revenue growth (Entrackr).
• Run rate beyond FY25: by mid-2026, the company was citing an annualised revenue run rate exceeding ₹1,000 crore (~$104 million) from residential and housing-society sales, a company-stated figure reported by Entrackr and, in similar terms, by TechCrunch.

Where the money comes from

• Residential vs commercial: about 80% of the business is now residential (individual homes and housing societies) versus 20% commercial, a reversal of the company’s original C&I-only footprint (The Better India).
• Geographic spread: operations grew from 16 cities across 8 states around 2024 (The Better India) to 29 cities across 9 states by May 2026 (TechCrunch, citing the company) — expansion has been more about deepening a handful of states than a wide national sprint.
• Customer mix, the surprise: despite the “homes” framing, housing societies — apartment complexes buying shared rooftop systems in one contract — have become a meaningful growth engine, with the company reporting close to 400 societies served by May 2026 alongside its roughly 50,000 individual homes (TechCrunch). A single housing-society deal effectively bundles dozens of “homes” into one sales and installation cycle, which is a more capital-efficient way to hit scale than door-to-door residential sales alone.
• Installed base: more than 150 megawatts installed as of May 2026, against a company-stated target of 200 MW in residential solar by the end of 2026 (TechCrunch).

The risks

• Unit economics that are still upside down: in FY24, SolarSquare’s EBITDA margin was -35.96% and its return on capital employed was -112.85%, spending ₹1.31 to generate every ₹1 of revenue (Entrackr). FY25 losses narrowed sharply, but the underlying mechanism — heavy material and installation costs relative to realised revenue on each system sold — has not disappeared, only improved.
• A hardware-heavy revenue mix with a thin services line: ₹173 crore of FY24 revenue came from product sales against just ₹2 crore from services, which actually fell 33.33% year-on-year (Entrackr). A model this dependent on one-time equipment sales carries less recurring revenue cushion than a maintenance- or financing-led model would, and margin sits mostly on installation markup rather than annuity income.
• Fast-diluting founder control: the co-founders’ combined stake dropped from about 38.85% after the Series B allotment to about 27.54% after Series C in under two years, with external investors Lowercarbon Capital (~16.1%) and Elevation Capital (~15.2%) now holding larger individual blocks than any single founder (Entrackr). Rapid, large primary rounds have kept the company funded through a capital-intensive growth phase, but at a real cost to founder ownership and, potentially, control over future strategic decisions.

The takeaway

The most transferable lesson from SolarSquare is not about solar at all: it is about what a founding team is willing to give up to chase a bigger, harder-to-prove market. Walking away from a working, profitable business to build an unproven one is usually bad advice — most pivots away from profitability do not get written up years later as the origin of a $470 million company. What made this one different was not conviction alone; it was that the founders could point to a real, if smaller, number — close to 5,000 homes solarised within two years of the pivot — before asking outside investors to underwrite the rest. The lesson is not “bet everything on belief.” It is “prove the smallest version of the harder business before asking anyone else to fund the bigger one.”

Frequently asked questions

What does SolarSquare actually sell?

End-to-end rooftop solar for homes and housing societies — site assessment, system design, equipment procurement, installation, discom paperwork including net metering, financing tie-ups, and ongoing maintenance, alongside a smaller commercial installation business.

Who founded SolarSquare, and when?

Neeraj Jain and Nikhil Nahar incorporated the company in Mumbai on 8 May 2015 as a commercial and industrial solar contractor. Shreya Mishra joined as co-founder and CEO in 2020 to build and lead the residential pivot.

How much money has SolarSquare raised, and at what valuation?

Around $114 million across five rounds as of June 2026, per Tracxn, including a $53 million Series C led by B Capital that closed around 16 June 2026 at a post-money valuation of about $470 million (~₹4,500 crore), per Entrackr’s cap-table analysis and TechCrunch’s reporting on the round.

Is SolarSquare profitable?

No. It reported a net loss of ₹37 crore in FY25 on revenue of ₹355 crore, though that loss was 46% narrower than the ₹69 crore loss in FY24, according to Entrackr’s analysis of its RoC filings.

How big is SolarSquare’s footprint today?

As of May 2026, the company said it had installed more than 150 megawatts of solar capacity across 29 cities in nine states, serving close to 50,000 homes and about 400 housing societies, according to TechCrunch’s report on the company’s Series C fundraise.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “SolarSquare bleeds in FY24 as losses surge 2.3X” (Fintrackr), February 2025.
• Entrackr, “Decoding SolarSquare’s Series B round, valuation and captable,” June 2025.
• Entrackr, “SolarSquare raises $53 Mn in Series C led by B Capital,” June 2026.
• Entrackr, “Decoding: SolarSquare valued at $470 Mn after Series C; co-founders retain 27.5% stake,” July 2026.
• Entrackr, “MS Dhoni invests in SolarSquare as part of $53 Mn Series C round,” July 2026.
• Entrackr, “SolarSquare raises Rs 100 Cr Series A round led by Elevation Capital,” November 2022.
• TechCrunch, “SolarSquare in talks to raise up to $60M as India’s rooftop solar market draws major VC interest,” May 2026.
• Business Standard, “SolarSquare raises $40 million in series B funding from Lightspeed,” November-December 2024.
• Inc42, “SolarSquare’s Valuation Likely To Triple With Fresh Funding,” November 2024.
• Inc42, “SolarSquare Nets $4.2 Mn To Scale Up Its Solar Tech Portfolio,” May 2024.
• YourStory, “SolarSquare bags $40M in Series B funding round led by Lightspeed,” December 2024.
• YourStory, “SolarSquare raises Rs 100 Cr Series A funding led by Elevation Capital, Lowercarbon,” November 2022.
• The Better India, “Startup by IIT Grads Helps Indian Homes Run on Zero Electricity, Earns Rs 200 Crore in Revenues,” 2024.
• Entrepreneur India, “The Solar Power Duo.”
• Tracxn, SolarSquare company profile, accessed June 2026.
• Trading Economics, USD/INR exchange rate, 18 September 2026.

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