Daylight Raises $75 Million to Turn Homes into Solar Power Plants
Decentralized energy company Daylight Energy announced that it has raised $75 million to grow its decentralized energy network that allows homeowners to generate and share power.
Founded in 2022, New York-based Daylight offers a decentralized energy model that enables help homeowners reduce energy bills and stay powered during outages, using a solar and battery storage installation that sends excess energy from the home back into the grid. By subscribing to Daylight’s energy service, homeowners can receive solar panels and battery storage at a cheaper rate than they would through traditional utilities. In return, Daylight aggregates stored energy from batteries and sells it back to the grid during peak demand periods, sharing the proceeds with participants.
Daylight said it aims to reduce the high marketing and financing costs that slow residential solar adoption, using decentralized finance to align incentives and reward participation. The company also issues ‘Sun Points’ to homeowners for supporting network growth and plans to introduce a network token in the future.
The company has launched DayFi, a new yield protocol that allows investors to earn returns linked to electricity revenues from the company’s expanding solar and storage portfolio.
Daylight Energy is currently funding subscriptions in Illinois and Massachusetts, and the company said that the new financing will enable the company to bring more homes online, as well as to strengthen the DayFi financial protocol, and scale its distributed energy model.
Jason Badeaux, CEO of Daylight Energy, said:
“To build the largest decentralized energy network in the world, you need to incentivize the behavior change to adopt distributed energy and catalyze a huge amount of capital behind it. Crypto is uniquely good at doing those two things, and creates opportunities to align incentives, drive down costs and rebuild this industry on a foundation of transparency, ownership and shared economic upside.”
The new capital includes $15 million in equity led by Framework Ventures, with backing from a16z crypto, Lerer Hippeau, M13, Room40 Ventures, EV3, Crucible Capital, Coinbase Ventures and Not Boring Capital, as well as $60 million project development facility was led by Turtle Hill Capital.
Zeev Krieger, CEO of Turtle Hill Capital, said:
“This is a dream project for a creative finance team, combining a novel business model, with purpose built specialty credit to accelerate distributed energy deployment. The stakes and potential impact are even more profound in a moment when traditional subsidy models face real uncertainty and change.”