Raise Green is an investment marketplace for green infrastructure and clean energy projects, and this week it has launched a ‘Turbo Tax-like’ platform that will simplify the paperwork to build a solar project and help crowdfund the financing to get it built. The solution, Originator Engine, was developed in partnership with IBM to help drive entrepreneurship and community resilience by empowering nearly anyone to get a bold solar project off the ground.
As part of this new service, Raise Green is announcing a new loan program to help elevate communities often overlooked in the green infrastructure space by offering additional financial assistance to anyone looking to start their own climate action project.
How it works
Raise Green’s marketplace offers a wide variety of replicable, templatized investment opportunities for solar power, affordable housing, electric vehicle charging stations, agriculture, water projects and microgrids. Each investment vertical is designed to have an immediate impact on the resilience of local communities with a chance to earn returns while building sustainable infrastructure.
Originator Engine automates the process of building a solar energy project by templatizing and aggregating what would be hundreds of pages of documentation. While most models used to set up clean energy businesses are cumbersome and fundamentally inequitable, Raise Green’s cost-effective solution fills the need for a common platform that provides innovators with real-world knowledge to develop and run their own solar business from start to finish in four phases:
1. Create: The Originator Engine guides a project creator through complex corporate obstacles to help them turn their project idea into a real business that’s ready for funding.
2. Fund: An originator gets access to Raise Green’s crowdfunding platform to finance their project, allowing anyone to invest.
3. Build: With the funds raised, an originator continues to develop and manage the project with guidance from Raise Green. This can include construction, permitting applications, etc.
4. Run: An originator sees the ongoing, direct impact of their project, gathering invaluable knowledge and experience along the way.
Whether investing $100 or as much as $100,000, everyone can be directly involved in owning a part of a climate action project to support sustainable infrastructure.
The Originator Engine also contributes toward the United Nations’ 13th Sustainable Development Goal by strengthening adaptive capabilities against climate-related hazards, integrating climate change measures into planning, improving education on climate change mitigation, and more.
Backstory
Raise Green’s Originator Engine was borne out of the complexity of a solar project with Columbus House, a non-profit providing homelessness solutions, during which they realized many of the documents being processed were similar.
Last month, Raise Green launched as the first crowdfunding platform for investment in clean energy projects nationwide with its first offering of 50+ projects in the pipeline. The Greentown Labs-based company is the first to offer equity crowdfunding focused on investments for climate solutions nationwide since the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) finalization of equity crowdfunding regulations.
“Raise Green is stripping away the barriers that often come with starting a business with an easy-to-use platform that automates the process of building local solar energy projects and funding them,” said Matthew Moroney, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer at Raise Green.
— Solar Builder magazine
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