As electricity and gas prices climb, ECAIR secures €11 million to ease financing for solar and home renovations
French FinTech platform ECAIR has raised €11 million in funding to transform how Europe finances its energy transition. The funding will be used to accelerate the roll-out of its new lending product and expand operations across France as the first step in its roadmap to galvanise Europe’s energy shift.
Participating in the round were Planet A, Übermorgen Ventures, Inco Ventures, Silence, Voyagers, Climate Club, Kima Ventures and BPI, with €6 million in debt from Enerfip.
“The energy transition won’t happen just because it’s the right thing to do; it has to make financial sense. We are removing every financial barrier so that starting a renovation or solar project becomes an economic no-brainer,” says Maxime Bensadoun, co-founder of ECAIR.
In 2025, EU-Startups reported several funding rounds in sectors adjacent to ECAIR’s focus on financing the energy-transition deployment layer.
Germany’s Reshape Energy secured €5 million to grow its building-energy services platform. Installer-support tools also saw activity: Dutch startup OpusFlow collected €3.8 million to extend its automation platform for renewable-energy installers, and Spain’s Clevergy raised €3.2 million to scale its smart-energy platform across Europe.
Together, these announcements amount to approximately €12 million in funding, illustrating consistent investment into solutions that help buildings, installers, and decentralised-energy actors adopt or manage energy-transition technologies.
ECAIR’s platform is a financial co-pilot for solar and energy-renovation installers, providing an instant, integrated capital stack that turns quotations into deployments.
ECAIR was founded in 2023 by Maxime Bensadoun, ex-Revolut and former Head of Payments at Lydia, and Victor Jolly, Lydia’s former COO. After launching a B2C construction venture together, they saw firsthand that installers are key to scaling the transition and that financing is the biggest barrier to that goal.
ECAIR is a financial copilot for installers working on energy transition projects. Its platform gives installers an instant, integrated financing stack.
With electricity prices surging 80%, and gas 120% in France over the past decade (as per data provided by ECAIR), energy efficiency and self-consumption have shifted from nice-to have to strategic economic priorities.
The French market for residential renovation and solar is worth an estimated €15 billion annually, and more than €100 billion across the European Union.
According to ECAIR’s benchmark data, up to 50% of renovation or solar quotes never turn into successful projects due to a lack of suitable financing solutions.
The pace and complexity of renovation projects on the ground mean installers still lack financial tools adapted for day-to-day real-world deployment. The company explains that plugging the finance gap is crucial for the deployment of technologies, including heat pumps, insulation, and solar installations at a scale that truly moves the needle.
“Maxime and Victor bring rare FinTech execution to one of the most operationally complex markets in Europe. Their product is elegant, fast, and built exactly where installers and customers feel the most pain. Demand is exploding – consumers want to reduce bills and emissions, but financing is blocking half the market. ECAIR is unlocking billions in latent renovation and solar demand,” says Jan Christoph Gras, General Partner at Planet A.
ECAIR recently launched a new consumer loan product that installers can offer to their customers, giving previously underserved installers simple and reliable access to financing solutions. Loans are calibrated to a home’s future energy savings, so that projects are cash-flow positive from day one, and assessed using ECAIRs proprietary, AI-agent powered underwriting engine.
This complements ECAIR’s B2B solution, which has reportedly deployed more than €8 million in working capital to enable installers to secure their cashflow and scale deployment of solar and energy renovation projects.
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