Aether Energy - AI platform for rooftop solar

TL;DR

Aether offers an AI-powered end-to-end platform for rooftop solar installers. We combine advancements in computer vision/lidar and LLMs to bring a unique workflow automation tool for solar installers worldwide.

Before we start, a sneak peek at Aether:

Some Background

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Hey all, we’re Shelby Bons and Zayne Sagar, two climate entrepreneurs! Our fundamental mission is to make rooftop solar energy accessible and cheap throughout the world.

For rooftop solar to be deployed, it’s really up to solar installers. To us, the people who run these companies are our heroes. Last year we spoke to hundreds of solar installers and one thing is clear - they don’t have the tools to make them successful. We reimagined rooftop solar software from the ground up for them.

Aether automates the boring stuff for solar installers using AI.

❌ The Problem:

The biggest problem in US rooftop solar is still solar soft costs. These are non-hardware costs associated with a solar project, and they amount to north of 60% of the total solar cost of an installed system! If you reduce this you create more demand for rooftop solar in the market = better outcome for our planet.

Contributors to high soft costs:

• PV CAD Design teams still manually build rooftop PV site designs. This is time-consuming and prone to lots of errors. Mistakes here mean re-doing plansets and permitting which can cost $1k - $2k extra.
• Almost all solar design tools are inaccurate in production and consumption modeling. This is what tells rooftop owners “Is this the right investment for me?” Most solar tools were built as a sidekick for sales reps, with just enough basic estimates to sell a solar proposal. Consumers are smarter now and recent legal litigations are forcing better modeling to be done when selling solar.
• Dependency on multiple platforms: Most solar companies use a software stack of 6 - 10 point solutions. Collectively the solution is dumb and creates chaotic workflows where deals get lost and project delays happen a lot. This is very expensive.
• Lack of project visibility across teams causing lost sales deals, and project delays

We estimate $5k to $ 7k added soft costs for a typical rooftop project occurring because of the above.

✅ Solution:

Aether is built to streamline the rooftop solar workflow end to end. Think Procore or Veeva but for Solar with an AI twist.

With Aether, solar companies can rapidly generate PV site designs, sell using a beautiful PV proposal, and then manage it to installation in one simplified workflow.

Aether is made up of hubs that help specific roles in a solar installation company do their job, but more importantly, collaborate with other teams as needed with the help of AI.

Our two core innovations:

• We built an in-house computer vision model.
• We also decided to build a mini fine-tuned model for solar. Being trained on items such as system production data, vision model outputs, etc. (Can’t give the rest of our sauce away!)

The result is a unified AI platform to streamline solar with solar agents.

Aether Platform - Sneak Peak

💲Opportunity: Aether will be a big player in the young and emerging Solar software vertical, which has a projected 20B Global TAM up for grabs by 2025.

About Us

Shelby and Zayne met at UC Berkeley close to a decade ago both originally being born in complete opposite ends of the world, France and Fiji.

Shelby studied Materials Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley and was briefly headed for a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics before founding Aether. She has worked at Dolby Laboratories, Voltaiq, and Sunrun in Data Science & Machine Learning roles.

Zayne had brief stints at multiple climate-driven companies, working on problems around space-based weather data and energy modeling problems at the intersection of software. He has built high-performing product & engineering teams from the ground up by the age of 28.

🙏 Our Ask:

• Please share this post with your network, and tell solar installers about us!
• If you are a rooftop solar installer, check us out at https://aetherenergie.com/ and book a demo with us!
• If you’re as excited as we are about this novel approach to solar software and would like to learn more about what we’re doing, comment below or email us at zsagar@aetherenergy.me

💲Early adopter discount: We’re giving solar installers 50% off whatever design tool they currently pay for.