Practica Capital made a partial exit from Lithuanian PV software company PVcase
Lithuanian venture fund Practica Capital made a partial exit from the Lithuanian developer of solar project design software PVcase, after a new $100M injection from London-based venture firm Highland Europe, US company Energize Ventures, and Boston-based existing investor Elephant. Currently, the startup secured over $123M in its history.
Practica Capital invested €250K in PVcase in 2018 with the Lithuanian fund Contrarian Ventures, which also backed the startup with €250K. According to the partner of Practica Capital Arvydas Bloze, he is “happy to see they raised 2x more than we thought the exit would be when investing in 2018”.
In 2021, Practica Capital and Contrarian Ventures once again invested in PVcase. Back then Boston-based fund Elephant also joined a €20M A-series round. \
PVcase was founded in Kaunas in 2018 by Douglas Geist and David Trainavicius. The company develops software for planning and designing solar projects. It incorporates 3D topographical data points to simulate the actual location of the solar plant, allowing customers to compete for and win more projects. The companies which work in the solar renewable energy industry already use PVcase’s automation plug-in for AutoCAD to design over 3 GW of projects.
The company’s solution helps to solve the problem of data risk. Because of the growth of the solar energy industry, developers of solar projects use more often software to automate tasks in design and ongoing operations. But data sources for that software are often presented in older formats, such as PDFs and hard copy records. And most solar software platforms can automate only a few tasks. Developers can use up to 70 different data sets, and in most of them, they have to match fields of data manually. That can create data risk.
In June, the company announced the acquisition of the US solar siting software platform Anderson Optimization. The amount of investment was undisclosed.
The startup will use the investment to develop a solution that covers every step in the design and operations process in a single platform, automate solar workflows, and increase data integrity.
According to the venture funds, they invested in PVcase because of its strong financial performance, and ability to acquire other software platforms. The startup has operated almost exclusively from its revenue. It allowed the company to save earlier raised investment for future acquisitions.
