- Sun King, the largest provider of solar kits for off-grid homes in Africa and Asia, has received $70 million in equity investment in an extension of its Series D round, led by LeapFrogInvestments (“LeapFrog”), the profit with purpose investment firm.
This investment is an extension of Sun King’s initial $260 million Series D, which was led by General Atlantic’s BeyondNetZero and M&G Investments in April 2022. This extension includes $38 million of additional primary investment, which will support the company’s plans to make consumer-financed solar power available to the 1.8 billion consumers across Africa and Asia who lack access to reliable electricity. It comes as increasing global energy prices and rising food costs have widened the electricity access gap.
Sun King’s Series D extension also includes additional secondary investment to complete the successful exit of all of Sun King’s prior institutional investors. Sun King’s founders retain voting control and as part of the transaction, LeapFrog will join the board, which now includes representatives of other Series-Dinvestors General Atlantic and M&G Investments as well as Prabha Sinha, the company’s first investor.
Today, Sun King operates the world’s largest direct-to-consumer, pay-as-you-go (PAYG) solar distribution network, delivering solar to 165,000 homes per month across eight countries of operation in Africa. In Kenya, where Sun King has operated for over a decade, more than one in five people in the country now use Sun King for light and power, with 22 million Kenyans served to date. While growing rapidly, the company has remained consistently profitable. Since the closing of the initial General Atlantic–led Series D round in April 2022, the business has achieved 95% year-over-year revenue growth.
In the last twelve months, Sun King has delivered 24 megawatts of solar generation capacity to three million homes and expanded into three new countries: Mozambique, Togo, and Cameroon. The company has extended over $500 million of solar purchase financing to date. Its network of over 20,000 field agents, 36% of whom are women, offers green jobs in areas with limited employment opportunity.
Author: Bryan Groenendaal
