tl;dr

Upfront helps merchants that sell clean energy products by turning billions of dollars of rebates into dramatically lower prices at checkout. Instead of filling out paperwork and waiting 6 months for a check, our software instantly applies rebates and manages the settlement in the background.

The Problem

Clean energy products have higher upfront costs while competing in markets defined by the importance of affordability (e.g. 60% of appliances are financed). Rebates are designed to offset these higher costs, but because rebates are complicated and not surfaced during buying decisions, consumers today choose products that are worse for both the environment and their wallets.

The Solution

We solve this problem by partnering with retailers to enable them to transform government and utility rebates into dramatically lower prices for their customers. This solution saves consumers money, increases retailer sales, and helps deploy rebates faster than ever.

Starting with EV Chargers, we qualify consumers for all applicable rebate programs in real-time and advance their savings at checkout. After purchase, we work with the consumer to process the rebate and manage the settlement with the rebate issuer.

The Team

We’ve both spent the last half decade helping merchants grow their businesses. Andrew was an engineer at Affirm, building servicing and payment systems scaling to billions of dollars in GMV. Thomas launched and GM’d markets for DoorDash both domestically and abroad.

As new homeowners we were both struggling to figure out what rebates were available and how they actually worked… and we’d spent weeks researching climate tech! Fellow consumers and retailers agreed, so in January of 2023, we started Upfront.

We're determined to help make clean energy products the obvious choice for consumers to stamp out the nearly 1 gigaton of CO2E emitted from America’s 124 million homes annually.

The Ask

• If you sell a product that receives government and/or utility rebates (especially EV chargers)–we’d love to chat! Book some time with us here.
• Know folks in the EV charger space? Let’s connect! Reach out to thomas@knowupfront.com with any relevant intros.

We'd love to hear your feedback in the comments below! Also feel free to reach out to us directly at thomas@knowupfront.com or andrew@knowupfront.com.