Greenlight Planet launched its original solar-powered lantern, the Sun King, in 2009, in an era when solar panel and LED technologies were just becoming efficient and affordable enough to make such a product competitive with old-fashioned kerosene lamps.

Co-founders Anish Thakkar and Patrick Walsh had been working together for two years prior, having met as engineering students at the University of Illinois, where their goals took shape to design products for the 1.6 billion underserved consumers living off the grid.

The original Sun King lantern was just that: A simple, modern solar-powered LED lamp, to replace smoky and dangerous kerosene lamps typically used in rural homes. Sun King was not only brighter, but it saved money for users, breaking even with a kerosene lamp’s recurring fuel costs in about a year.

Around the same time, off-grid households across Asia and Africa were rapidly adopting low-cost mobile phones. People needed a way to charge their phones without endlessly walking back and forth to the nearest electrical grid connection, where shops typically charge hefty fees to simply plug in a phone to charge. In 2011, Greenlight Planet launched the Sun King Pro, its first solar lantern with phone-charging capability, as well as the first solar lantern in the world to use a high-quality lithium ferro-phosphate (LFP) battery. Users now had access to modern light and phone charging right at home.

The company would go on to design and manufacture an ever-widening range of award-winning solar-powered home energy systems, with multiple lights and light switches for the whole home, and the ability to power home appliances like radios, televisions, fans, and computers.

Designing and manufacturing rugged, affordable solar products was a necessary first step. Distributing those products to 1.6 billion people living off the grid was the next big challenge.

Early on, Greenlight developed a multi-channel approach that still serves as a model over a decade later: In order to spread the word and build trust in after-sales service, the company built large networks of direct-to-consumer sales agents, recruiting and training trusted members of local communities to operate as “Sun King Energy Officers.” This network of last-mile agents connected Greenlight Planet directly with consumers, and directly with the people who would serve them, providing a critical feedback loop to teach the company how to build better products and how to manage a successful distribution system.

Over time, as consumer demand picked up and the company built an understanding of what it takes to succeed in last-mile distribution, Greenlight began working with last-mile distribution partners, ranging from mobile network operators, to microfinance institutions, to oil and gas companies, to NGOs, who began distributing Sun King products alongside their other product categories.

Understanding the challenges of distribution to underserved, off-grid consumers proved to be critical: Greenlight’s core competencies now included both product and distribution. But a third piece of the puzzle was still missing.

By 2014, the most successful last-mile distributors of Sun King products proved to be microfinance institutions and agricultural cooperatives. Distributors that could offer end-consumer financing found almost limitless demand for solar products: With the initial barrier of up-front cost lowered, Sun King was more affordable than kerosene lamps and phone charging fees, not only in the long term, but right from day one.

With microfinance institutions and cooperatives providing financing for solar products to end consumers, products were finally affordable to many people. But offering such “solar loans” on an as-needed basis was difficult even for microfinance institutions. To make financial sense, such loans often had to be bundled with other loan offerings (such as small-business or agricultural loans) and were not available to everyone.

Beginning in 2015, Greenlight Planet sought to more consistently meet the need for solar financing using a program called EasyBuy™. EasyBuy is a model for pay-as-you-go (PAYG) financing of solar products, allowing people to pay over time. For the consumer, this is similar to the way that consumers previously paid over time for kerosene to fuel their lanterns, for electricity fees, or for mobile phone charging fees. But at the end of the payment plan (typically less than a year), they would now own their solar product outright, and have free access to solar energy after that.

The EasyBuy business model is enabled by two technologies: cloud software for tracking and managing payments and accounting, plus a simple computerized system inside the solar product itself.

The cloud software allows the company to keep track of each customer and their payment progress: When the customer makes a payment (usually using a “mobile money” system), the software sends a unique keycode to the customer’s phone. The customer types that keycode into a keypad on their solar product. Each code enables the solar product for a specific length of time, and finally unlocks the product permanently after the last payment is made.

This pay-as-you-go solar model proved to be the final missing piece of the puzzle to allow broad adoption of Sun King solar products. By 2019, Greenlight Planet operated the largest direct-to-consumer PAYG solar distribution and service network in the world. The network has to date delivered over 1.3 million PAYG solar products to date in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Nigeria. Numerous wholesale distribution partners have adopted the same program, with Greenlight Planet providing not only EasyBuy™-enabled solar products, but also case studies and training to build the required pay-as-you-go distribution and financing networks on the ground.

Over the last decade, Greenlighters’ passion to serve off-grid families has dictated the evolution of the company’s product and service offerings and enabled the company’s dramatic global growth. What started as an electronic hardware company expanded to become a distribution company, and reached true scalability.