Software at the Center: Unlocking Capital for Community Solar

The community solar sector is growing, but a significant bottleneck in financing often prevents promising projects from reaching fruition. 

At the 2025 Community Solar Innovation Summit in Denver, Amanda Li, COO and Co-Founder of Banyan Infrastructure, sat down with Tao Mantaras, COO & Co-Founder of Concentro and Laurel Passera, Senior Policy Director at the Coalition for Community Solar Access for a panel discussion titled "Software at the Center: Navigating Evolving Markets." The conversation focused on how software solutions can help overcome financial challenges and connect capital with deserving community solar projects.

The Bottleneck: High Overhead and Lack of Standardization

Li emphasized that while billions of dollars are available on Wall Street for infrastructure, these funds often don't reach the community solar projects that need them. The core issue, she explained, isn't a lack of capital, but rather inefficiencies in the financing process.

She highlighted how small-scale deals, particularly in community solar, can become "sub-scale to a financier" due to the high overhead costs associated with due diligence, legal work, and portfolio management. Many financiers have minimum check sizes, meaning projects below $50 million or $100 million struggle to attract investment.

Li further elaborated on the problem: "The moment financiers stare at the project details and do the diligence on the documents (reviewing with portfolio management, the lawyers, the tax accountants, etc.), the overhead cost kills the deal. That is something software can assist with." The lack of standardization with the volume of data across these assets makes it difficult for traditional financiers to engage effectively.

Data as the Driver for a Liquid Market

For Li, data is the key to unlocking these bottlenecks. "With good data, we can drive the transparency necessary to price more quickly and evaluate a variety of deals at once," she explained. By standardizing and digitizing data, it becomes easier to understand and compare projects, leading to better pricing and increased deal flow.

Li shared an ambitious vision for the future of community solar finance: "The dream we have for both commercial and community solar is that one day we have something similar to the commercial mortgage or commercial real estate markets that are highly liquid, and banks can walk into a Bloomberg-like terminal to do transactions." This level of liquidity can be achieved through robust data management.

Banyan Infrastructure tackles this problem through its core software platform, which manages assets from origination through portfolio and fund management. Li highlighted how this software eliminates manual, chaotic processes: "How do you make sure you're not running a closing checklist with your financier on a Word document and paying a lawyer $2,000 an hour to figure out where the deal is, or spending an analyst’s time to comb through 1,000 documents to figure out exactly where things are."

Beyond Software: Market Coordination and Impact Measurement

Beyond its core software, Banyan Infrastructure is also stepping into a new role as a neutral market unifier. As market conditions shift—with changes in tax credit regimes plus catalytic funding—Li sees an opportunity to connect different capital sources.

"How do we take all the data we have developed for banks and financiers and philanthropy and public capital to make sure that the deals get done?" Li questioned, emphasizing the need to create a "more thriving ecosystem to ensure that the maximum number of deals out there can get capital."

This market coordination involves facilitating connections between green banks, private market participants, and larger pools of catalytic capital. A critical aspect of this is driving standardization. Li noted, "If your funding requests all look the same, despite the fact that all of you are asking for less than $50 million and your renewable energy projects have vastly different needs and structures, it's going to make for a really difficult conversation. Many larger financial organizations are set up to write $50 million checks; anything smaller, with its associated due diligence and administrative complexities, becomes too cumbersome for them to manage effectively." Banyan Infrastructure aims to create templates and clear expectations to make smaller deals more attractive to larger financiers and aggregators.

Li also underscored the importance of impact measurement and reporting. Banyan Infrastructure's platform automatically reports on over 200 impact metrics, utilizing data collected during origination and leveraging public data sources, such as census information. This allows organizations to easily demonstrate their impact on communities, job creation, and energy savings.

Optimism for the Future

Despite the current market uncertainties, Li expressed strong optimism. "In the last 15 years, I have never seen so much desire for collaboration on the financial market side," she shared. This increased transparency and openness among financiers, driven by the current challenges, is a "huge silver lining." Li believes this collaboration will ultimately lead to a larger, more efficient market with cheaper and better capital.

The path forward for community solar, according to Amanda Li, is clear: leverage software to digitize and standardize data, foster ecosystem collaboration, and use transparent impact reporting to attract the necessary capital and ensure deserving projects get built.