Solar monitoring and analytics platform Prescinto announced that it raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from Venture Catalysts, an integrated incubator for startups.

According to its press statement, angel investor Rohit Chanana and several others also participated in the seed funding round.

Prescinto is a Gujarat-based artificial intelligence-powered platform that focuses on performance enhancement and helps increase the power production and return on investment (RoI) of solar facilities. The company is a vendor-agnostic platform that provides services such as data acquisition and visualization, advanced analytics, and operation and maintenance automation.

“The next wave of profitability for renewable energy players will come from performance enhancement as the margins narrow down further. We are fortunate to have partners like Venture Catalysts to share our growth journey with,” said Puneet Jaggi, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Prescinto.

The company said its patent-pending solution identifies the root cause of generation loss and provides real-time actionable insights to enhance energy generation by 7%, improving the return on investment of solar projects up to 20 to 50 times for owners and developers.  Prescinto claims its consumers such as Macquarie, GMR, Essel Infrastructure have achieved traction of three times the annual growth reaching over 8 GW of solar projects across 14 countries.

Global venture capital funding for solar companies in the third quarter of 2020 was up 182%, with $183 million in 15 deals compared to $65 million in five deals in the second quarter of 2020, according to Mercom’s 9M and Q3 Solar Funding and M&A Report. Of the 15 solar VC deals announced during the quarter, only six were early-stage deals. In Q3 2020, three Balance-of-System (BOS) companies raised a total of $15 million.

Tech-based solar monitoring tools are getting traction in India as they help optimize cost-effectiveness. Earlier this year, NTPC floated a tender for centralized monitoring analytical tool for the 250 MW Mandsaur solar PV project in Madhya Pradesh.

Earlier, NTPC had invited bids for the SCADA and weather monitoring system package for Solapur solar power project in Maharashtra.

Harsh Shukla is a staff reporter at Mercom India. Previously with Indian Express, he has covered general interest stories. He holds a Masters Degree in Journalism from Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication, Pune.

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