Entrepreneur of 2025 Finalist: Emily McAteer

Emily McAteer, co-founder and CEO, Odyssey Energy Solutions, Boulder

McAteer, 39, heard a talk from Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the late chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, circa 2010 that cemented her career path.

“It just clicked for me that the bulk of the greenhouse gas emissions growth is going to happen in emerging economies and figuring out how to have economic development in a low-carbon way is mission-critical,” says McAteer.

Ever since, she has focused on bringing distributed energy projects to emerging markets, including stints as a Fulbright scholar working in India and as chief revenue officer of Frontier Power, SunEdison’s microgrid subsidiary.

Upon arriving in Fort Collins for an entrepreneur-in-residence program with Factor[e] Ventures in 2016, McAteer fell in love with Colorado. She launched what she now calls “Odyssey Energy Solutions 1.0” from Boulder the following year with a platform to connect donors and financiers, solar providers and customers in emerging markets.

“Through that, we developed a huge network of engineering procurement and construction firms that are building solar projects, financial institutions like the World Bank, and equipment manufacturers, all on the platform,” says McAteer.

The model shifted in 2022, when the Odyssey team decided to raise venture capital and launch a commercial version of the platform that included financing. The company quickly closed on a $15 million Series A round and launched that platform, “a solar procurement marketplace with embedded credit,” in 2024,” says McAteer.

“Essentially, if you’re a solar installer and you buy your batteries, your inverters, your photovoltaic panels through us, we will give you better pricing and streamline the digital procurement process, but then also embed about three to four months of credit directly in the order,” she explains. “That helps companies get the working capital they need to get through the procurement and construction phase of a project to installation when they have a customer payment waiting for them.”

The platform is now operational for projects in Africa, India, Brazil and Mexico. More than 3,000 companies use it for finance and procurement for smaller-scale solar projects for factories, malls and other facilities in places “where the grid is unreliable because electricity demand hasn’t been able to keep up with grid supply,” says McAteer. “Distributed energy is the solution to have low-cost, reliable power.”

The business model upends the centralized energy paradigm with an eye on climate impact. “In Nigeria, the alternative was diesel generators,” notes McAteer. “Obviously, that’s not a climate-friendly version of backup generation, but also the government got rid of fuel subsidies in 2023, so it’s very expensive to run a diesel generator. Solar is a much more cost-effective solution to have reliable power.”

As Odyssey scales, the 50-employee company needs to raise debt to continue to support dynamic growth in its markets. “So far, we’ve had basically unlimited demand for the product, so we’re constantly trying to match our capital supply with the demand for orders,” says McAteer.

McAteer says a philosophy of “one foot in front of the other” has served her well as an entrepreneur. “We have a really big vision, and our overall mission and vision of the company hasn’t changed since day one, which is to accelerate development of distributed energy in emerging markets,” she explains. “But each step that we’ve taken has led to the next one, and what we’re focused on today looks very different from the way that we envisioned approaching it in the beginning.”

www.odysseyenergysolutions.com