Exclusive: Enpal wins Volksbank as a partner - and dreams of cars

Mario Kohle's solar start-up has prominent investors, is flirting with an IPO and wants to raise money via crowdinvesting. Now the company can inspire a Volksbank - and then there's this car idea.

Mario Kohle is enthusiastic these days. "Sustainability is fucking awesome," he bellows into his laptop's microphone, pushing all the energy in his voice into the Internet connection. He would have every reason to be distracted, tense and cautious. In recent weeks, the question of Enpal's future has been quite chaotic.

First, Manager Magazin reported that co-investor and start-up wunderkind Alexander Samwer wanted to take Enpal public as early as 2021 and spared no comparison. Samwer, who is invested through his Picus Capital fund, even spoke of the German Tesla. Then the denial from Kohle and his team: Yes, an IPO is possible, but no, there is no concrete decision yet.

Enpal inevitably needs capital, and much more of it than conventional start-ups. On the one hand, the usual business operations have to be financed, which is done through classic venture capital. On the other hand, it needs money for the business model itself: Enpal earns this money by renting out solar systems. The users pay off a piece of it every month, and at some point the system belongs to them completely. However, Enpal has to pre-finance the photovoltaic systems, which is done with the help of banks. ING, among others, is already on board and now, according to Startbase information, the start-up has once again been able to win Berliner Volksbank as a refinancer. It wants to provide ten million euros, having already provided 20 million euros by the end of 2020.

The only thing greater than Mario Kohle's enthusiasm is presumably his own vision. The current number of more than 10,000 rented solar systems is to quickly become more, 750 alone thanks to the additional ten million euros provided by Volksbank. But Kohle has long been thinking of more than just solar modules, as he explains to Startbase: "We also want to go into the field of electric cars, that's simply part of it," says the serial founder, who drives an e-car himself. "A car compared to Tesla today is like going from horse to car in 1900," he says.

The man, whose company was described by Samwer as a "Tesla without production," doesn't want to build the electric cars himself, but Kohle can apparently well imagine renting them out. "The combination makes sense because people can save cash that way. Having your own power plant on the roof and using it to fuel your own electric car: that could be awesome." According to this vision, Enpal could become less of a solar panel rental company and more of a renewable energy platform.

"We also want to go into the electric car sector"

Mario Kohle, Enpal founder

It would suit Mario Kohle, who, by his own account, had his "Greta Thunberg moment" in 2015. Back then, he says today, he realized that humanity was heading for a major disaster if something didn't change soon. In the meantime, he has fully arrived in the modern lifestyle: E-car in the garage, veggie burger as a standard order.

While the price of energy from coal or oil remained relatively constant at the time, that of renewable energy kept falling over the years, with the number of solar installations on single-family homes only increasing by six figures a year. "That was way too slow," Kohle says. He saw the problem in their marketing: solar panels for single-family homes were difficult to pitch. "It's just not as compelling as buying a car," he says.

The founder, who previously set up "Käuferportal" (today: Aroundhome), a brokerage platform for products in and around the home, and sold it to ProSiebenSat.1, founded Enpal in 2017 and wants to do things differently, more digitally, more simply. Instead of a fancy executive office, there are Ikea tables at the beginning and the question: Can this work? Especially in the beginning, he was afraid that he would lack the corrective, someone to say he was talking garbage, and he is also otherwise open with his concerns. The fear that all this will fail, Mario Kohle has it all the time. "That's a good thing, too. It keeps you from making unnecessary mistakes," he says.

In the meantime, Kohle is visibly more relaxed, which is probably due in no small part to the great support he receives from well-known investors with whom he can play mental ping-pong. These include Alexander Samwer, Lukasz Gadowski, Zalando bosses Robert Genz, David Schneider, Rubin Ritter and, via an investment vehicle, Leonardo DiCaprio.

In the future, he also wants to lead Enpal into other countries, in addition to the potential IPO, the car plans and almost incidentally, the company is currently raising what it claims is the largest crowdinvesting campaign for solar plants in Europe. There is already a landing page on which the company advertises "attractive conditions", more is to come in the next few days. Coal seems indefatigable: "We can, of course, cling to a past that was never awesome because there was less prosperity, less leisure, less equality. But we can also just design something awesome," he says. Then he has to move on.