We win SunShot Catalyst $100K Prize

For those of you following our founder story, you’ll remember in December that we won a SunShot Catalyst Business Innovation Award. That award was $25,000 to use for developing a new minimum viable product on a developer platform called TopCoder. We decided to build a lightweight and fast web design tool. A front end, if you will, to our PVComplete CAD — the engineering back end. We had just 60 days and we built a gorgeous user interface that allows salesperson to design solar projects on the web. The secret sauce is….all design done on the web will transfer to files in PVComplete CAD and back. Now sales and engineering have a common language.

Impressed? So was the judging panel consisting of Andrew Beebe of Obvious Ventures, Jake Saper of Emergence Capital, Warren Doi of the prestigous Energy Accelerator in Hawaii, Stephen Leist of PPG Ventures and Farshad Samimi of Enphase Energy. The competition called DemoDay consisted of 8 minute live pitches with product demos against the 17 finalists teams. Daniel and Claudia brought intelligence and energy to their pitch and beat out the other teams to be one of the five winners of $100K.
The award ceremony included a giant cardboard check, a la Publisher’s Clearing House for $30,000. The other $70,000 comes in December when we complete our milestones. A great day for the PVComplete team.

Read about the contest at the US Dept of Energy: http://energy.gov/eere/articles/sunshot-announces-solar-start-winners-catalyst-demo-day

Cardboard check rides shotgun with Sasha!