Site icon The Invincible India

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

The Invincible India
The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for ZunRoof.

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

Company ZunRoof Tech Private Limited (CIN U40300HR2016PTC064528)
Founded 2016, Gurugram
Founders Pranesh Chaudhary and Sushant Sachan, both IIT Kharagpur alumni
Businesses Rooftop solar design, installation and O&M under ZunRoof/ZunSolar; IoT smart-home devices under Zunpulse
Latest FY revenue ₹26.43 crore, FY24 (year to March 2024), down 11.46% year-on-year
Latest FY profit/loss Net loss of ₹14.24 crore, FY24, narrowed 51.7% from FY23’s ₹29.48 crore loss
Listed Private — no listing
Market value / last valuation Reported at approximately ₹115 crore (~$12 million) as of December 2024, per Tracxn
Key shareholder / CEO ANBG Enterprise LLP (Godrej family office), majority owner with over 70% of equity as of September 2025; Pranesh Chaudhary, Founder & CEO

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.

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.

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.

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

Fiscal year Revenue (₹ crore) Net loss (₹ crore) Source
FY22 (year to March 2022) Not disclosed; reported down ~36% year-on-year Not disclosed Entrackr, August 2023
FY23 (year to March 2023) 29.85 29.48 Entrackr, August 2023
FY24 (year to March 2024) 26.43 14.24 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.

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

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).

Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.

Exit mobile version