We’re a family business. Leveraging a combined deep knowledge of the contracting business, project financing, and database engineering, Philippe Hartley and Morgan Hartley set out to solve a major hurdle to the greening of America: helping finance the greening of Main Street America, the small and medium businesses that want to do well, and do right, but always find themselves challenged to find the resources to move ahead; the retailers, the ranchers, the health care providers, the manufacturers, the apartment building owners, the schools, places of worship, etc. While we serve the interest of business owners and managers, we decided to attack the problem by putting tools in the hands of those that could propagate financing solutions fastest, the contractors. They are the ones bringing proposals, suggestions, concepts and plans to Main Street. But few have project finance departments, and few have the expertise to implement one. They dread the question “Do you offer financing?”.
We wanted to become a virtual project financing department for those tens of thousands of commercial contractors across the country who were going to do the work that would collectively lower our national carbon footprint.
We initially set-out to accelerate one of the greatest new financing inventions of the 21st century: Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy financing (C-PACE). Plagued by a massive challenge of market education, tremendous diversity of program guidelines between participating localities and states, discouragingly uneven availability and guidelines, we created PACEfi.com in 2021, and were helped in launching it by a portion of a grant awarded to Virginia PACE Authority. To this day, our instant results of C-PACE project eligibility, competitive funding options and instant application define us as the best national C-PACE resource for small and medium projects in the nation.
Market feedback urged us to quickly expand beyond C-PACE, and include a wide range of mechanisms of financing as options for any project inquiry. PACEfi became CleanFi in the summer of 2022. Soon after, we became the first FinTech company US to become Finalist, U.S. Department of Energy Solar Prize.
In 2023, CleanFi introduced the White Label, which allows other companies and websites supporting the renewables, efficiency and resiliency contracting industries to offer instant commercial financing solutions to their users. Using our “out-of-the-box” usability and easy customization, CleanFi White Label Affiliates now count in the dozens reaching all corners of the building owners and contractors universe.
In 2024, CleanFi rolled out BidDesk, a bidding mechanism for those projects needing third-party-owned solutions. Launching this service initially to serve the PPA mechanism, CleanFi plans to expand it to other funding structures such as Operating Leases, Energy as a Service, and Developer’s PPA’s.