Dylan Rudney, founder of Verano Energy, discusses raising over $1 billion for renewable energy projects, focusing on scaling from startup to an Independent.
Dylan Rudney, founder of Verano Energy, discusses raising over $1 billion for renewable energy projects, focusing on scaling from startup to an Independent Power Producer and raising $100M for projects. This involves securing significant follow-on funding beyond early stages.
What we done most recently, which I'm most excited about is is around 3 years ago we said, "You know, if we're able to do everything, we're able to source the projects, get the permitting, the engineering, we can build, we're bankable EPC fund, we can or EPC firm, we can we can operate the projects, we can close the the PPA or the off-take agreement with the the buyer of the energy, and we also know how to finance, you know, the project finance. Why are we giving so much value to the equity rather than just raising it ourselves and doing it ourselves?" And that was when we decided we wanted to become an IPP or an independent power producer and compete with the biggest guys around, right? And so we we challenged ourselves to to to to play on the bigger the bigger fields in the big leagues. And we found a fund which was a Brazilian debt fund who who came in and supported us. It's called
Lumina Capital. A really smart group of young young guys out of São Paulo. And we raised $100 million of of growth equity to to fund projects. And we were able to at that point control the entire process from the very beginning until the operation or the flip of the asset. And that was very cool and we were able to grow our internal pipeline by almost 10 times in 2 years. And so now rather than selling our assets at some stage of the development process, we're able to get to operations, be selling energy with a long-term cash flow guaranteed. And then look at opportunities of divesting. And and by doing that we get access to institutional capital through project finance. Project finance is a way that we're able to finance the construction at basically much cheaper rates than you would ever find for equity or mezz or dev funds or anything. And so we try to do is leverage as much as we can
with banks through project finance.