Solar financing platform Wunder raises $3.6M

Wunder Capital, a provider of solar financing for medium-sized businesses, has raised $3.6 million in a new round of financing. The company has raised $4.7 million from Techstars Ventures, Fenway Summer Ventures, and FinTech Collective, alongside existing seed investors.

Wunder, a financial services company for the solar industry, graduated from Techstars in 2014.

The founders of Wunder don’t come from a traditional financial technology or renewable energy background. The three co-founders of the company cut their teeth in advertising and marketing technology companies on the East and West Coasts, according to co-founder and chief executive Bryan Birsic.

According to Birsic, Wunder is lending to an incredibly underserved portion of the solar generation market. While the amount of grid-scale solar generation has quadrupled and residential solar installations have doubled, the number of small-scale projects priced at roughly $500,000 have only grown by 25 percent.

These smaller installations represent a large chunk of commercial real-estate, and by unlocking the financing for these funds, installations by these companies could skyrocket, or so Wunder’s thinking goes.

Accredited investors can tap this market by investing in two Wunder Capital funds: an income fund and a bridge fund, where participating accredited investors can put up money for stakes in solar projects at annualized returns of somewhere between 6 percent and 11 percent.

The company sources its solar projects by working with the installers, developers and distributors who will be receiving the company’s money.

“Wunder’s platform represents a new era of alternative lender, the vertically-­integrated lender. They address critical issues of customer acquisition, underwriting, and support with unique capabilities specific to the commercial solar industry. We could not be more pleased to add Wunder to our portfolio of alternative lenders and to bring Wunder direct access to our deep capital markets network,” said Brooks Gibbons of the Fintech Collective in a statement.