Our Story
Founded in 2019 in Mumbai, Aerem began as a question: why does going solar in India require navigating four government portals, two banks, and a handshake contractor? We built the answer.
Founded 2019 · RBI-licensed NBFC · $34.5M raised
India had abundant sunlight, falling panel prices, and a government with genuine intent to put solar on every rooftop. It also had a process that took 90-150 days, required homeowners to visit DISCOM offices in person, relied on informal installer networks with no quality guarantees, and offered financing that required weeks of bank paperwork for amounts that cleared in days.
Solar adoption was stuck. Not because of technology. Not because of consumer awareness. Because the systems required to convert intent into installation did not exist.
Vikram Mehta had spent eight years structuring finance at ICICI Bank and three years at McKinsey's energy practice. He had watched qualified borrowers fail to access solar loans not because of creditworthiness, but because no lender had built a product for it. Ananya Krishnan had built distributed infrastructure at Amazon Web Services and payments systems at Flipkart. She had solved harder coordination problems at larger scale.
The insight was straightforward: the missing piece was not a solar panel. It was a platform -- one that could provide financing, installer quality, and homeowner trust simultaneously.
"Every Indian home deserves clean energy. We built Aerem to make that possible -- not in decades, but in months. When your EMI is less than your electricity bill, the decision makes itself."
Vikram Mehta, Co-founder and CEO
How we got here.
NetZero Finance Pvt Ltd incorporated. Co-founders Vikram Mehta and Ananya Krishnan file the first NBFC license application with the Reserve Bank of India. The founding premise: solar adoption in India is a financing problem, not a technology problem. The NBFC license, if obtained, would allow Aerem to originate, underwrite, and disburse solar loans directly -- without a bank as intermediary.
The Aerem Partner network launches. Fifty residential installations completed. The first version of the digital financing platform goes live, compressing pre-approval from 4-6 weeks to under 24 hours. Blume Ventures leads the seed round. Their thesis: "We backed Aerem early because the founding team understood that solar adoption in India is a financing problem, not a technology problem. Five years later, 3,200 installer partners prove the thesis."
NetZero Finance Pvt Ltd receives its RBI Certificate of Registration as an NBFC. This is the operational inflection point. Aerem can now originate solar loans at the point of installer-homeowner engagement -- a first in the Indian solar market. The AeROC monitoring platform launches, enabling real-time generation tracking across every installation.
Five hundred megawatts of distributed solar capacity enabled through the Aerem network. The platform expands to 75 cities. Rs 200 crore in financing disbursed. University of Tokyo Edge Capital Partners (UTEC) and Avaana Capital join as investors, recognizing the fintech infrastructure and climate impact dimensions respectively.
Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) and British International Investment (BII) invest after independent due diligence processes. Schneider Electric -- the world's leader in energy management -- joins as a strategic investor. Total funding reaches $34.5M from six institutional investors. The platform expands to 100+ cities.
Aerem crosses 1,200 MW of cumulative distributed solar capacity enabled across 3,200+ certified installer partners in 150+ cities. PM Surya Ghar tailwinds accelerate the market: Rs 75,021 crore in government allocation, 20.8 lakh installations completed nationally as of December 2025. Aerem Home launches as the consumer-facing platform, channelling pre-qualified homeowner demand to the certified installer network.
PM Surya Ghar launched in February 2024 with a Rs 75,021 crore total outlay and a target of 1 crore residential solar installations by 2027. As of December 2025, 20.8 lakh installations are complete. The conversion rate from registration to commissioning remains below 23%.
The bottleneck is not awareness. It is not intent. It is execution: DISCOM feasibility timelines that vary from 15 to 120 days by state, subsidy disbursement that averages 90-120 days post-commissioning, and a fragmented installer network that lacks the financing infrastructure to move homeowners from decision to installation.
Aerem addresses every friction point in that chain.
20.8 lakh
PM Surya Ghar installations completed as of December 2025
3,200+
Certified Aerem installer partners across 150+ cities
Rs 500+ Cr
Financing enabled through our RBI-licensed NBFC
