We’re excited to announce Energize’s continued investment in Sitetracker, the operations management software for renewable energy and telecommunications infrastructure deployment, marking our third investment in the company. Sitetracker has raised $96M of new capital, including a $66M Series D led by Energize and another $30M in debt financing from BridgeBank. Existing investors H.I.G. Growth Partners, National Grid Partners, Clearvision Ventures and others joined us in the Series D financing alongside new investors NTT Docomo Ventures, Kingfisher Investment Advisors and Raine Next-Gen Communications. This is an investment out of our second growth equity fund, and Kevin Stevens, a partner and head of Energize’s growth equity platform, joins the company’s board of directors.
This latest funding brings Sitetracker’s total capital raised to nearly $200 million and will help the company support the rapid energy transition while cementing their standing as the telecom industry’s deployment software of choice.
The tailwinds that prompted Energize’s 2019 Series B investment in Sitetracker have grown even stronger over the last three years, as global critical infrastructure deployment has scaled to accommodate the buildout of 5G networks and a cleaner, more distributed energy grid. When Energize initially invested in Sitetracker, we were guided by our thesis that the decentralization of telecom assets was a preview of the transformation awaiting the energy sector. Once a system composed strictly of poles, wires and underground cables, the telecom industry built more cell towers between 2018 and 2021 than it had in the last seven years combined, bringing the total number of operating cell towers in the U.S. to more than 417,000. That growth has only accelerated: the total number of towers and cells globally now exceeds 5 million. The Sitetracker team had already established their platform as the go-to software for telecom companies at the time of our initial investment, and they’ve continued to strengthen their market leadership in the time since by building a customer base that includes AT&T, Lumen, Zayo and British Telecom.
The energy sector is undergoing a similar transformation, as renewable energy sources are reconfiguring a system that was once primarily power plants, poles and wires. Hopefully by now you’ve seen our Electrifying Everything Deep Dive which includes our mental model for innovation cycles within energy technology:
1. Hardware costs are driven down by R&D investments where market share shifts to the lowest cost provider and customers benefit from commoditization.
2. To meet the demand created by falling prices, new businesses arise with distinctive offerings that are only available by leveraging scale.
3. These businesses eventually need software that uniquely caters to their problems; after attempting in-house solutions, they often turn to external providers that can better meet their needs.
Sitetracker’s platform fits firmly in the third category. Their software allows energy companies – including current customers ChargePoint, NextEra Energy, Southern Company and Duke Energy – to effectively deploy sustainable infrastructure. Solar developers, for example, can use Sitetracker to manage permitting, interconnection requests and construction progress, providing transparency and accelerating time to revenue for their customers. When applied to EV charging infrastructure, developers can oversee the full breadth of chargepoint installation, from managing construction timelines and permitting to ongoing maintenance and vendor management.
Given the rate the energy sector is deploying distributed assets, Sitetracker’s technology solution can help enable outsized growth. The solar industry expects to add over 700 GW of capacity between now and the end of the decade – a number that was estimated before the U.S. passed the Inflation Reduction Act intended to advance clean energy adoption. And the U.S. has installed approximately 120,000 active public EV charging ports to date, with Sitetracker’s current customers owning nearly 50 percent of that total market and accounting for much of the planned growth between now and 2025.
Sitetracker’s team is adept at converting favorable tailwinds into tremendous market capture. Their software has delivered a 27 percent average increase in project turnaround for their customer base spanning telecom, energy, construction and engineering, real estate and media. And they continue to set their sights on customer success and growth. Sitetracker is currently operating in 30 countries, with plans to deploy their platform to more than 100 countries by the end of 2024. So far in 2022, the team has been building out their software solution offerings, expanding their platform’s mobile functionality and forming partnerships in the 5G space.
We’re excited to support Sitetracker CEO Giuseppe Incitti and his team as they continue to accelerate critical infrastructure deployment.
