Simpa provides solar power on financing to households and small-shops in rural and semi-urban India. Its pay-as-you-go model seeks to make clean energy simple, affordable and accessible to all. Simpa also provides after sale services to its customers, making it unique from any other player in the sector in India.

Simpa sells solar power on financing to households and small shops in rural India. The company invented the pay-as-you-go (PAYG) solar leasing model and is pursuing its mission to make clean energy simple, affordable and accessible for all. Innovative distributed energy solutions and business models are required to reach 75 million households lacking access to modern clean energy through the grid. To scale, these models have to be commercially self-sustaining and rapidly scalable. Through its operations in the last 3 years, Simpa has demonstrated a commercially sustainable model for delivering clean-energy solutions to energy-poor households and small-businesses at scale.

Under this model, customers make a small initial down payment to have a high quality solar-home energy system installed. Next, customers pay for energy service by purchasing “prepaid-energy-days” from local agents – the same way mobile prepaid airtime is purchased in rural India. After the completion of a payment period of 12 to 36 months, the system unlocks permanently, ownership is transferred to the customer, and the system provides clean electricity to the customer free of cost for the remaining useful life of the system ranging between 5-7 years. The model is enabled by Simpa’s patented prepaid metering and mobile payments technology. The technology platform is fundamentally a risk-mitigation platform that provides transparency and provides revenue assurance for the investors that underwrite the capital costs of the solar equipment. It also greatly reduces transaction costs of serving the target population which is rural and widely distributed.