Chamath Palihapitiya's SPAC for Sunlight Financial is an additional sign of a renewables boom

Jan 26, 2021 02:15 PM ET
  • Former Facebook staff member as well as present enfant terrible of high money Chamath Palihapitiya is making news again with a $1.3 billion twofer SPAC and PIPE deal into the solar power financing business, Sunlight Financial.
Chamath Palihapitiya's SPAC for Sunlight Financial is an additional sign of a renewables boom
Image: Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Vanity Fair / Getty Images

Sunlight Financial is essentially a lending business that provides solar installers a way to provide finances to home owners to finance solar power and also battery installments and various other home improvement projects.

While it may be one more indication of the Roaring '20s return to haunt worldwide economic markets in the lead-up to a devastating meltdown of the international financial system, there's at least some approach to the madness with Sunlight.

That's since there's a lot of tailwinds behind an organization that's providing money to supply much better accessibility to solar energy, energy storage and power performance upgrades.

The investment, along with Coatue, Franklin Templeton as well as BlackRock, will value the lending institution at $1.3 billion. A healthy and balanced number, yet one that's not huge, particularly provided the $705 million in funding that Sunlight Financial has elevated over its history, according to Crunchbase.

As Alex Wilhelm kept in mind earlier today, Sunlight Financial would certainly have likely touched public markets sooner or later, given a pretty strong monetary efficiency-- also during the pandemic:

Taking a look at the numbers, it's rather clear that the business can have gone public in a year or more; an additional year's growth, as well as it would certainly have had sufficient earnings to go after a traditional debut. Via this SPAC-led offer it will certainly venture out faster and have more cash money while it scales. Perhaps that is the value of the SPAC here for Sunlight.

Sunlight also has the benefit of being an openly traded renewable resource dip into a time when those companies are in short supply and high demand from institutional capitalists.

Throughout 2020, big money relocated to discover ways to support services that can aid reduce the results of climate modification or slow down the swiftly warming up temperature levels in the world.

" Industry dedications to mitigate environment change threat is supplying capitalists with presence that there is momentum amongst decision-makers to drive adjustment," stated Richard Manley, the managing supervisor as well as head of lasting investing at CPP Investments, in an interview last year. "There's a gratitude within the public markets that the interesting shift options either within core operating subsidiaries or investments in the VC arms of company companies haven't supplied public equity investors the actually focused possibilities they've wanted."

With the launch of Palihapitiya's most current SPAC, that trend appears set to proceed in 2021. As Rob Day, a long time financier in environment technology wrote in a straight message late last year:

" [The] present wave [of SPACs] is since over the past 24 months the institutional investor world has actually come totally right into believing that environment solutions are mosting likely to be a major development location in the 2020s and beyond, yet they weren't seeing alternatives offered to them for spending right into," according to Day.

" The offered publicly traded 'green' firms were already obtaining really bought up, and the personal equity options were underwhelming as well (smallish in the case of VC, reduced returns in the case of large-format tasks). Throw in a Robinhood market of retail capitalists with a lot of excitement for EVs and such, and you have a good dish for this to happen."


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