# Powur 2021 Shareholder Update | Powur

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- Published at: 2022-02-16 22:17:58 UTC
- Updated at: 2025-07-11 16:34:51 UTC

## Author
Jonathan Budd

## Subject
Powur

## Content
Greetings Shareholders,Our growth from $8M in revenue in 2019 to $188M in 2021 accelerated so quickly that we had an enormous amount of catching up to do. I believe in 2021, through extraordinary effort, we have caught up to our peers in required infrastructure and are ready to start innovating and solving higher value challenges once again.I am very proud of the hard work this team is doing to operate one of the leading national residential solar companies. The fact we made it through hyper growth, installing over 10,000 power plants on our customers’ rooftops with no unresolvable incidents, is a testament to the tenacity, the brilliance, the resolve, and the dedication to the men and women who truly make Powur work on a daily basis. My hat is off to them.Let’s dive into the numbers for 2021:We grew quickly again in 2021, achieving annual revenue of $188 million, representing 96% growth over the prior year. We also achieved record high revenue of $58.5 million in Q4, representing growth of 28% year-over-year and 17% over prior quarter. During 2021, we launched storage as part of our product line and also expanded our geographic reach into 16 states. In 2021, we experienced huge market share gains with Powur representing an estimated 1.5% of national residential solar installations. Our Q3 market share was highest in Texas at 8%, followed by 2% in Florida and 0.9% in California. We believe California is our current biggest growth opportunity but see virtually every market as untapped and ripe for massive growth. We also expanded our geographic reach into 16 states, with North Carolina, South Carolina, Colorado, New Jersey, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico coming online in the second half of 2021. In Q2 we launched storage as part of our product line, with Powur representing nearly 1% of all residential storage installed nationwide in 2021. In Q4 we saw a huge gain in storage installed and we anticipate growing our storage business by 500% in 2022 and reaching 2-3% of market share. This represents a part of our longer term product expansion plan which will also include a greater diversity of home upgrades and services offered.  Throughout 2021, the solar energy industry continued to face growing supply chain shortages, especially as the supplier situation intensified with a variety of U.S. Customs issues against major Chinese manufacturers. To ensure Powur’s resilience against these supply shocks, we redirected our supply chain strategy to onshore U.S. suppliers, diversified our reliance across more suppliers, and utilized our cash reserves to secure inventory of solar modules. Addressing our supply chain issues was a significant step towards building a scalable foundation to support the next stage of growth.Due to the supply chain fallout, we posted a Q2 loss of $0.5 million, but returned to profitability and generated positive EBITDA of $0.7 million in Q3 and $1.5 million in Q4. In the coming quarters, we expect to operate closer to break-even while we rapidly invest cash in scaling operations, building infrastructure, and deploying software platforms to capitalize on the opportunities we see in the market. We believe this is the time to continue investing to solve problems and going after substantial growth strategies that create new value for our customers, sellers, and installers. We’re Going Big or Going Home.We also continue to invest cash in advance to secure our solar module equipment and believe this is a prudent strategy to ensure there are no business stoppages from lack of supply. One of the greatest short-term risks we face is the competition for supply by the largest solar installers. We continue to monitor this situation as closely as possible, but the bottom line is that we are going to play it safe using our cash position to secure product in advance.In addition to our current cash reserves, we were holding $9M~ of solar equipment inventory on our balance sheet at the end of 2021. We expect cash to continue to grow in 2022 even as we forecast 30-50% YoY revenue growth and will be investing substantially to support that growth. Looking Forward: EvolutionGoing forward, Evolution is a key theme for Powur and is a natural progression of our 2021 themes of resilience, rapid learning, innovation and impact. We made Evolution the theme for this year’s first National Seller Convention which took place in January 2022. Evolution perfectly describes the stage we are in as a business. We are evolving. We must evolve. The world around us is ever changing and the industry is changing. Residential solar is growing strong and we are taking market share, but the industry will need policy support to continue growing at the same pace. 2022 will be a big year, driven by solar investment tax credits that could expire without Congressional support for extensions, and net metering continues to be a looming issue in California and nationally. We will keep monitoring these trends which have been playing out over the past decade. And we will continue to build organizational and operating model resiliency to ensure we will either thrive in spite of headwinds or capture opportunity that comes from tailwinds.  The climate in which our customers live is also changing. Demand for solar has been accelerating in states where there has been weather disruption and electric grid instability. We must also change and grow to meet this demand by expanding our storage products, manufacturer relationships, sales processes, and installation capacity. In a short period of time, we have grown from 50 to 150+ employees. To be scalable and grow more profitably in the long run, we must evolve into a smarter, more automated, more sophisticated company. Each of our four pillar departments have tangible priorities that will help us become a more efficient and scalable company in 2022. Highlights of our priorities include: Operations: Deploy renewed installer engagement model that rewards performance and attracts the best installers in solar; create project services organization that delivers lower cost and faster results.Technology: Transform PowurOS to fully support our Ops 2.0 “Project Services” model; automate installer payments to support roofing; enhance reporting; automate commission processing; automate project management, finance, contracts processes; launch multiple new software platforms for market growth, design, contracting, and financing. Brand and Marketing: Complete a new certification process for all our categories of sellers with robust solar training; enhance the seller’s first 90 days with automation and messaging; refresh our brand to express the mind and the soul of Powur, launch a lead generation marketplace. Finance: Advance systems efficiencies and reporting capabilities through the implementation of Tipalti and Netsuite, integrations with PowurOS, and BI reporting. Get new Accounting team settled in with Finance Ops team; onboard HR Director.  As we look down the road ahead, we are focused on building the functional capacities Powur needs to deliver an amazing installation experience while retaining our scalable cloud-based model. This includes owning design and engineering as a core competency, and deploying innovative technology solutions (like our recently launched virtual site survey app) for how we gather site survey data both cost effectively and efficiently. We are also aggressively focused on innovating the installer value proposition, so we can marry the uniqueness, culture, and differentiation of our customer acquisition model to our fulfillment model. This is a huge area of opportunity.Over the past year, there has been an enormous amount of rapid learning and investment to build the infrastructure to support a $200M-$400 million revenue company. Powur will continue to generate significant revenue growth in this next phase of our evolution as we drive towards our goal of becoming a publicly-traded company. We will continue to invest in disruptive innovation to look less and less like our competitors as we firmly establish ourselves as a platform ecosystem for solar. Finally, Powur would not exist unless we believed that our work matters to the world. Last month we released our first Impact report. We’ve developed several sustainability goals and we invite you to learn more about our promises to our customers, our partners and our environment. This report will show you our impact, growth, reach and purpose specific to becoming the fastest growing residential solar company in the U.S.It’s time to take solar to the next level and go where no solar company has gone before. As we enter 2022, we know our work has just begun. We are constantly looking at new ways to evolve: to innovate, create and sustain. Keep rooting us on - the team is charged up, the future is bright, and we are grateful to be on this journey together toward a more healthy, sustainable, and evolved world. As always, thanks for being part of this adventure and for the role you’ve played in getting us this far.To the top,Jonathan BuddPowur Founder / CEO