PeriUrja | How this Mumbai-based Solar Tech Startup is providing affordable Next Generation Solar Energy Solutions

• ByStartupStory     |    September 18, 2021

“Climate Change is the place to be right now. It is an opportunity for this generation to contribute to society as well as create wealth,” said Sarvesh Shetye, Founder, PeriUrja in an insightful interview with Startup Story.

World’s energy demand is significantly growing at a fast pace because of population explosion and technological advancements. It is therefore important to develop reliable, cost effective and everlasting renewable energy sources for energy demand arising in future. Solar energy, among other renewable sources of energy, is a promising and freely available energy source for managing long-term issues in an energy crisis. “With an aim to enable distributed generation and other climate adaptation technologies for smaller consumers by optimizing financial structuring and technological access, PeriUrja was founded,” said Sarvesh. Mumbai-based Startup PeriUrja was established in 2017 by Sarvesh Shetye and Satish Singh. Sarvesh has an engineering degree from Mumbai University and MBA from IIM Lucknow. He has worked with organizations like L&T Finance Holdings & Trivantage Capital. Satish Singh, Co-founder, holds an engineering degree from Purvanchal University and Project Management Certificationfrom IIT, Delhi.

The company focuses on reducing global carbon footprint by promoting renewable energy as an alternative to other conventional sources of energy. They are an EPC (Engineering, Procurement and Construction) company specialize in setting up solar energy power plants for residential, commercial and institutional buildings. PeriUrja is involved in full scale project development right from design, engineering, sourcing, installation, and commissioning.

Foremost PeriUrja offers a hook up Solar Panel. Speaking with Startup Story, Sarvesh elaborated the uniqueness that PeriUrja offers in financial engineering to its clients “We are offering the OPEX model. In the OPEX model basically we put up the plant with our investment. There is zero investment from the customer side. In lieu of that we sign a long-term contract. Let’s say a 10 year contract. We basically sell the electricity at a 30-40% discount to the tariff that the customer is getting from the discount. So, at the end of the contract we transfer the entire asset to the customer free of cost. Essentially there’s zero investment to start with and the customer is saving about 30-40% of electricity. Furthermore, after 10 years the customer doesn’t need to pay anything for the electricity. The entire maintenance, insurance, warranty claim, component failure, design flaws anything that comes up it’s basically on us because we need to optimize the generation.” Besides that, PeriUrja offers technology used for climate adaptation such as EV charging points, energy storage services, energy monitoring, energy efficiency, etc.

Challenges faced by PeriUrja

When asked about the challenges faced by PerUrja the founders replied, keeping covid in view the demand hasn’t actually affected, but definitely the supply have been postponed due to many factors like logistics, lack of labor, etc., As being a project acquisition company, start stop mechanism of operation did bring down the morale of the team members. Further explained by Satish, “Our operation is majorly in the residential societies. As per government guidelines containment and micro-containment zones were made, because of that the execution part was highly affected. Although the commissioned site hasn’t been affected as it has come into the essential category also.”

Customer Experience

The feedbacks for PeriUrja have been great until now. Sarvesh said people are ready to use this model. They never had any problems and neither any delinquencies have been faced by us also. They are quite ecstatic with the seamless process they get to experience. He further added even a lot of organic sales have happened with references.

Team behind Periurja

“From planning to designing to management everything happens in house except the labor work which is done by an outsourced team. Everything that requires engineering skills is done within the organization precisely because we wanted to build processes and we wanted to stick to our quality control.” said Sarvesh. PeriUrja has a dynamic team of engineers and has an outsourced team of 15-20 people.

Market Expansion and Funding

As far as future plans for PeriUrja are concerned, Sarvesh said that they want to expand their projects in other metropolitan cities. Furthermore, once this covid phase gets normalized the company is looking to expand their internal team as well. Sarvesh told Startup Story about funding that PeiUrja is a fully bootstrapped company. Moreover, they are now in talks with investors for raising equity and debt.

“People should come forward and collaboratively take steps to revolutionize the sudden surge in climate disruption. They can start by generating their own green power energy,” said Satish Singh, Co-Founder, PeriUrja.

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