Wednesday
January 20
2021

Innovex Closes an Equity Investment With Gaia Impact Fund, a VC Fund Dedicated to Renewable Energy Entrepreneurs

Innovex, a Uganda-based startup enabling pay-as-you-go and remote monitoring for solar companies, closed a Series Seed Round with an equity investment from Gaia Impact Fund.

Innovex is a technology company with hardware and software development teams offering a service 100% made in Africa. The company was founded in 2016 by Douglas Baguma K and David Tusubira, both graduated from the Makerere University. The 2 co-founders came to the realization that solar energy had the potential to bridge the energy access gap for the 30 million Ugandans remaining without electricity, but were frustrated the technology was not reaching Ugandans fast enough. Douglas & David took on this problem by helping installers and distributors of off-grid solar energy systems to scale up using digital tools. There are 300 active solar companies in Uganda alone, and thousands more in sub-Saharan Africa.

The team has developed ‘Remot’, a cloud-based IoT solution enabling solar companies, EPC and distributors to remotely monitor and manage their energy systems. ‘Remot’ has transformed the way many of these solar companies do business such as better aftersales support and opening up pay-as-you-go for larger size solar systems. This has reduced overall downtime and improved accessibility of solar systems and equipment. Many of these solar assets are installed in facilities such as health centers, schools and SMEs across the 5 countries in the East African region i.e. Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, DRC and Ethiopia.

Photo courtesy of World Bank Photo Collection.

Source: Gaia Impact Fund (link opens in a new window)

Categories
Energy
Tags
business development, impact investing, renewable energy, solar, startups