Welcome Odyssey Energy Solutions to the Equal Ventures Family
By: Rick Zullo, Co-Founder & GP at Equal Ventures
Prior to becoming a VC, I spent the first half of my career in the clean energy space before “pivoting” into technology investing about 10 years ago. I spent my early years running around the Department of Energy and working with utility clients, but the last 18 months of my tenure at Deloitte was spent working in our Emerging Markets practice. I got to work on some amazing projects, playing a role in the deployment of billions of dollars into clean energy infrastructure projects.
My very last assignment was to win the bid to operate a platform for deploying clean energy infrastructure in South East Asia in conjunction with USAID. Our proposal for a bid like this was generally no less than 200 pages and collectively took hundreds of hours of time to assemble. I had already informed the firm that I was headed off to business school with a planned departure shortly before my wedding, so there wasn’t any major reason to over exert myself. That said, I knew that this assignment was something I wanted to be a part of and volunteered to take lead on the proposal. In the final days leading up to the deadline, I showed up at the office on a Thursday and didn’t return home until Sunday morning, pulling 3 straight all-nighters (with a few intermittent naps on a couch at the office) to get our proposal done — I wanted this assignment that badly. When I came home early Sunday morning, I told my fiancé (now my wife of 10 years), “I have to fly to Bangkok in 4 hours, can you help me pack a bag?” (not exactly the best request to make to your spouse a month before you’re getting married). I flew to Bangkok, we won the bid and over the last decade, Deloitte has helped facilitate over $500m of clean energy projects through that platform. It was all well worth it.
Fast forward 10 years later, our team has been on the hunt for a “Business in a Box solution for Clean Energy Developers”. We developed our thesis, vetted it through our network and published with Climate Tech VC. The post and our thesis have subsequently been viewed over 40,000 times. We evaluated dozens of companies in this space before being introduced to Emily McAteer from Odyssey Energy Solutions. Emily is truly one of the most impressive people I’ve ever met. After graduating from Brown, she began her career on the climate team at a financial risk management firm before being awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to focus on Rural Electrification in India. She then received a dual MBA/MPA from Stanford/Harvard before joining SunEdison as the Chief Revenue Officer of their Frontier Power group.
She started Odyssey, with a singular purpose — to democratize clean energy development in emerging markets. When she started the company 5 years ago, “cleantech” companies were unfundable, let alone ones focused on emerging markets. Over the years, she’s had to kick, claw and fight to keep the company alive and grow it into a profitable and growing enterprise. Perhaps even more astonishing, she’s accumulated over $1b of financing on her platform with over a thousand developers. As we called experts in our network, both Emily and Odyssey were well known fixtures in the emerging markets’ clean energy space, leaving us with the feeling that we had stumbled upon one of the best kept secrets in climate tech.
While our focus had been on the US market, Emily opened our eyes to the emerging market lens, which amplifies many of the themes that made us so excited about our initial thesis. The opportunity is bigger, the project economics are better and the digital adoption/maturity is lower. Make no mistake, this will be an outrageously audacious challenge, but providing the software tooling, financing and procurement access for the WORLD’s clean energy transition is just about as big of a TAM that you can tackle. As we engaged with Emily, it was almost instantly obvious (hopefully on both sides) that we should partner together. While Emily’s credentials are certainly impressive, her earned experience in this world is second to none and we gravitated instantly to strategy sessions over pitches. She’s accompanied by Piyush Mathur, who brings incredible on-the-ground expertise having led a pay-as-you-go solar system company (Simpa Networks) to a successful exit.
We’re excited to announce leading Odyssey’s $5.3 million Seed round, with participation from Twelve Below, Founder Collective, Abstract Ventures, My Climate Journey Ventures and Sandeep Jain, co-founder of WorkRise (fka Rigup). This round will position Odyssey to expand their capital markets offerings and advance their procurement solutions, further their market leading position as the platform of choice for emerging market clean energy development. You can read more in TechCrunch here.
I couldn’t be more excited to return (a decade later) to tackling one of the greatest challenges of our time and to work with a founder as brilliant, tenacious and delightful as Emily to do it. Welcome to the Equal Ventures family, Emily and the Odyssey Energy Solutions team!
PS — the team is hiring aggressively, so if you’re interested in joining the foremost company in emerging markets renewables development today, please apply!
*Read more on Twitter here
