GreenLancer, the Detroit-based solar engineering company Xconomy profiled last July, announced last week that it has oversubscribed its Series A fundraising round, snagging $275,000 from four Michigan-based investors.
The company, which is based online and employs a national network of contract employees, or greenlancers, to work on jobs, is leaving the round open as it waits for expected funds to come in from an individual investor in Grand Blanc, MI.
“All of these investors started coming out of the woodwork,” says Michael Sharber, GreenLancer’s CEO. “It’s been great.”
BlueWater Angels, the Midland-based VC firm, is the lead investor; joining them is the Traverse City-based Northern Michigan Angels, Rick DeVos’ Grand Rapids-based Start Garden; and the Detroit-based Bizdom accelerator.
There are seven full-time team members working out of the Detroit office, which will soon be moving back downtown to 1500 Woodward Ave., and Sharber says the company has refined its software platform to help companies reduce their “soft costs.”
GreenLancer develops its projects cost-effectively in the cloud, calling on its team of engineering freelancers to design and build clean energy systems with an early focus on solar and photovoltaic applications. Sharber says that the company has been doing a lot of work in in the Midwest, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia. GreenLancer has also done work for the U.S. military.
In the future, Sharber says, GreenLancer will continue to expand and work on developing an application programming interface. “We’re looking to take our same business model and dive into other verticals, like wind, hydropower, and geothermal,” he says.
