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Ikenna Oguguo. Co-founder and chief product officer of Wetility. Picture: SUPPLIED.
Ikenna Oguguo. Co-founder and chief product officer of Wetility. Picture: SUPPLIED.

The growing trend towards smarter energy consumption in SA is the focus of this edition of Business Day Spotlight. 

Host Mudiwa Gavaza is joined by Ikenna Oguguo, co-founder and chief product officer of Wetility. 

Wetility is a solar solutions provider. Its offering includes hybrid inverters, battery systems and solar panels for homes and businesses. The company also offers various financing options to suit what the consumer can afford.

In recent years, solar companies have done well as a result of the unreliable power delivery by Eskom and its rolling blackouts in 2022, 2023 and the start of 2024. With power now more secure, solar players such as Wetility have relied more on helping consumers and businesses to track and manage power consumption.

Join the discussion: 

Oguguo outlines how the group has stayed relevant through these various shifts. He explains the company’s approach to bringing new products to market and trends in the local energy sector. 

Over the years, the company has attracted much attention from investors looking to back its business model, some with equity and other with debt. 

Wetility raised R930m through a Series A funding round in 2023 from a consortium that included Metier Sustainable Capital II, Sanlam, and the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC).

The solar company has also been backed by pay TV operator MultiChoice. It recently secured a R500m structured capital partnership with Jaltech, a local funder of solar energy projects. 

The funds are earmarked to fund solar and battery systems as Wetility is pushing to add more than 16MW of solar capacity to the national distributed energy footprint, and avoid more than 250,000 tonnes of CO₂ emissions.

Through the discussion, Oguguo outlines Wetility’s business model evolution; shifts in consumer energy consumption; working through a partner ecosystem; funding the business; and an outlook for the future. 

Business Day Spotlight is a MultimediaLIVE Production.

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