Palmetto absorbs $29m Round B financing

Palmetto, a solar energy implementation company with HQ in Charleston, SC and offices in San Francisco and Seattle, founded in London in 2009, has just closed $29m Series B. The round attracted a wide range of investors with interests in various verticals, including Evergy Ventures, Arctern Ventures, Shell Ventures, Greycroft, Lerer Hippeau, Box Group, Falkon Ventures, and the Leto Family Office. In 2018 Greycroft led Round A when Palmetto got $6m investment. Palmetto builds and deploys simplified software systems to help consumers handle their energy expenditures.

Unicorn Nest Dataset Insights

5 out of 8 investors of Round B did not take part in Round A, so they are new: EV, AV, SV, FV, and LFO. No surprise they decided to enter because they are known for investments into Clean Energy.  EV and SV are venture subsidiaries of major companies in energetics and fuel. And are closely connected to each other. In February 2019 Palmetto raised Debt Financing to fix problems with their project and corporate finances and upgrade their supply chain management. This was a reason for participation of LFO owned by Arizona-based Andrew Leto, who has rich 13+ years background in the Transportation Industry starting at Logistics Freight Systems. Three old investors, Greycroft, LH and BG are active but not in the area of Clean Energy and even IoT. But they participation explains why Palmetto re-focused their operations from individual consumers to the corporate sector. They are very confident in the Enterprise Software space.

Unicorn Nest Analyst Team Opinion

«For all of the investors Palmetto aged 10+ is quite an old start-up. They used to invest in 2-4 years old companies with exit expectations at 5-6 years. That is why all the VCs have a low follow-on index. Palmetto plans to use raised money for team growth, R&D, data science and geographical expansion, so exit opportunities will not be that soon. But it is very interesting to observe the impact the VCs will make on the start-up».