Washington, D.C.-based Arcadia, a clean energy unicorn, has raised $125 million in new funding led by Magnetar Capital (Evanston, Ill.). Others who participated in the round include New York-based Keyframe Capital, an existing investor, and Macquarie Asset Management’s Green Investment Group.
Arcadia, founded in 2014, has raised more than $500 million from investors such as JP Morgan and Tiger Global, including a $200 million Series E round in May. Eric Scheyer, partner and head of Energy and Infrastructure at Magnetar, will join the Arcadia board.
“Our platform is unlocking the big grid worldwide, providing simple APIs and software solutions for hundreds of the leading companies across electrification,” said Arcadia founder and CEO Kiran Bhatraju, 36. “Our customers are driving residential and commercial decarbonization through personalized energy solutions that couldn’t exist without easy access to utility data, tariffs, and payments.”
Arcadia, which Scheyer believes has an opportunity to play a transformational role in global energy transition, has built a platform that pulls data from utilities across the country, allowing companies and homeowners to then identify clean energy sources from where they can buy electricity. Notably, it helps two-thirds of American homeowners who can’t install rooftop solar to source their energy needs from neighborhood solar farms.
Scarred by Coal
Kiran Bhatraju is the son of an immigrant doctor from India. He grew up in Kentucky’s coal country, wearing a hard hat and exploring the mines as a child. Raised in Pikeville, a town with a population of less than 10,000, he watched his doctor deal with “black lung,” a respiratory ailment that strikes coal miners.
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When 22 — after earning a B.A. degree from University of Pennsylvania — Bhatraju came to Washington, D.C. to work for Congressman John Yarmuth and stayed back to found two companies. Bhatraju’s first venture was American Efficient, which measures energy efficiency in wholesale power markets. In 2014, he started Arcadia, with $250,000 from friends and family, on the premise that every American consumer could also be a producer, pushing energy back into the grid.
Arcadia’s corporate clients include Ford Motor, Salesforce and Snowflake. Over 300 new energy companies use its platform to personalize energy products with features such as auditable carbon accounting reports. Its Arc platform has over 700,000 consumers and the company has emerged as the largest manager of residential community solar subscriptions in the U.S. So far, Arcadia has made four acquisitions — Urjanet, iSolar, Nanogrid and Real Simple Energy — in its journey to a $1 billion valuation, achieved last year.
At 36, Bhatraju is also an author (Mud Creek Medicine: The Life of Eula Hall and the Fight for Appalachia; 2013), member of the World Wildlife Fund’s National Council, and board member at Rewire America and Environmental Voter Project.
