Andrea Barber had a singular vision: to create a cleaner and more sustainable energy model. After years of working in the sustainable energy industry in her native Spain, Brazil, Chile, and the United States, Andrea realized there was a huge global bottleneck in designing solar energy plants. Breaking ground on a new plant anywhere in the world requires an incredible multidisciplinary effort to design the structure, including spreadsheets, drawings, reports, diagrams, and blueprints. Andrea and her cofounders Miguel Ángel Torrero and Juan Romero developed a solution: a cloud-based software called pvDesign to automate and optimize the study, analysis, design, and engineering of photovoltaic plants in minutes instead of weeks. The SaaS platform offers a faster, more automated, accurate, and reliable method than traditional engineering, improving the profitability of users assets. Their startup, RatedPower, allows companies considering solar energy to use pvDesign to calculate the most efficient and optimal arrangement of solar installation based on their location, topography, solar radiation, and electrical configuration in seconds—in turn reducing manual and mechanical costs along the way.
When the RatedPower team began shopping around their cloud software, potential customers were blown away by pvDesign’s efficiency. 25% of the companies that signed up for the two week trial would purchase a full license, and before long, they were servicing dozens of clients in multiple countries. But as they onboarded more and more customers, the RatedPower cofounders realized that while they all had exceptional industry expertise, none of them had experience in managing or scaling a startup.
Luckily, all three were already very familiar with the nearby Google for Startups Campus Madrid. Andrea and the team had been working in the Campus Madrid cafe from the early stages of their startup, where they networked with other founders in varying industries. RatedPower had also participated in a startup incubator partnered with Tetuan Valley, a program for early stage startups located within the Campus Madrid space. Later, they entered Seedrocket, an accelerator for startups which also has a space within the Campus but focuses on bringing industry experts and investors to become mentors for participants. After both of these programs, Andrea applied to Google for Startups Residency, a six month hands-on, customized program to help growth stage founders like Andrea scale their companies. The Residency allowed them to make Campus their official home and gave them dedicated facetime with industry experts and Google mentors to help them solve every startup’s most pressing challenges: fundraising, hiring, and scaling.
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