SPARK Nigeria Seeks $70m to Expand Its Energy on Demand Service SPARK NigeriaThe company prides itself on being an Optimum Power Solution provider. The startup is looking for investments in the region $70 million to expand its operations and offer energy on demand service throughout the country.
The 100% Nigerian-owned company SPARK Nigeria, has more than 5 years of experience in Nigeria’s power sector with over 300,000 customers for two public utility companies in six States.
Chinedu Amah, Founder/CEO at SPARK Nigeria during an interview with TechEconomy.ng said, “Our solution is simple. We want to be able offer energy on demand for Nigerians. Hopefully, within the next couple of years, reaching the rest of the African market because we’re discussing Africa’s Free trade zone, and we know that there’s a lot of energy apathy across Africa. “We want to be able to validate that a person can pay for the electricity, especially for those in urban and semi-urban areas; they can pay for the electricity. If you can give us an average of how much you use in a month, that will be matched against the hours of availability on grid. “Let’s say you have six hours, we match your load against what you require for another 6 or 12 or 18 hours of supply. So once we determine that factor for you, we validate that you are creditworthy and can handle that amount of payments in the month, and then it’s a simple process that should take less than seven days. We come in and you are serviced”. Rural areas need to know what the key is SPARK NigeriaIt is a productive way to use power. According to Amah SPARK NigeriaThe desire to reach spaces with agro-production. “If we can advocate community by community; whether it’s cassava, palm oil, farm produce, or vegetables, agro produce requires either preservation or reprocessing. We want to be in a position to supply energy for the processing and preservation points. “First of all, why is that important to us? We can reduce their processing costs or increase their preservation ability, which would result in a higher or greater disposable income for rural areas. I like to call it ‘reengineering the rural Nigeria economy”, he said The SPARK Nigeria’sCEO believes that steady electricity can be key to reengineering Nigeria’s economic. This will enable it to reduce rural-urban migration, improve its disposable income, and make Nigeria more capable of ensuring food security. “We spend a lot of money importing food when we have a lot of arable lands, which are not being put to use. That also is one of the factors that is impacting the economy because we’re importing too much food as well. We want this model for rural, urban, and semi-urban areas. When asked if they were interested in SPARK NigeriaI am currently seeking investment to advance your capital intensive plans. Amah said: “SPARK was about one year old when we began this journey. Because there’s a B2B site where we offer support to distribution companies, and we are even hoping to get into franchise management agreements with some distribution companies. It was the beginning of our journey that I began to understand and learn about building from scratch. Before that, I would have to say that what we were doing was something one of my older brothers would call subsistence, similar to farmers who just wanted to survive. “We were just trying to eat. This is how we came across a UK-based consulting firm. They’ve been awesome. Reading so much made me realize how little I really knew. Then I realized that I didn’t know anything about cash flow. For our first trip, I believe we will need to spend somewhere in the $70 million range. “The reason is that there are a lot of hardware requirements for us because we’re not building the base model of our strategy on selling hardware. We’re building it on selling a service to people. So we’re going to have to keep or deploy an inventory across the board. “So, I think we’re looking at somewhere in the range of $70 million. I don’t know if we’re going to go for a second round, or if that $70 million is going to lead us to an IPO. Following our model, by the time we cross our first 5000 users, the next thing we want to start looking at is, we want to jump all the way heading into the EV market, because at 5000 users, whether they’re clustered or distributed, what that means for us is that we can also start deploying electric vehicles. “So, I don’t know whether we’re going to go for another round of funding, or we’re just going to go head-on into an IPO. My first goal is $70 million. I don’t know how I am going to raise it. SPARK Nigeria’s primary goal is to bridge Nigeria’s electricity gap using functional solutions backed by technology to support an under-served and underfunded electricity market.
B2B services are used by them to improve industry performance, and to offer clean energy on request to small businesses (who are underserved), because they believe that this two-pronged approach is the best foundation for a reengineered Nigerian economic system with reliable electricity supply.
