Houston software startup to use fresh funds to become 'unquestionably the best' for the electricity industry
HOUSTON INNOVATORS PODCAST EPISODE 84
Sameer Soleja went to business school and came back into the workforce with a bit of a revelation about software for the commodities industry.
"I realized, 'wait a second, we've been making terrible software and selling it for tens of millions of dollars," Soleja, CEO of Molecule, says on this week's episode of the Houston Innovators Podcast. "We had to be able to do something better than this — technology is better than this."
Soleja founded Molecule in 2012 to address the problem. The technology isn't unfamiliar to what ardent stock traders have at their fingertips, but before these types of platforms came into the picture, commodities companies didn't have a central platform.
"The way to think about the product is if you have a brokerage account — like Robinhood, or something like that — you see how much stock you have and how much you've made or lost," Soleja says. "For companies that are trading electricity, crude oil, natural gas, and other commodities and agricultural products, they also want to see how much of each thing they have and how much they've made or lost. But they don't just get to log into their brokerage account and figure it out. That's in a lot of different places."
Lately, a couple companies have bought up some of the businesses in this sector, leaving a lot of room open up at the top. Soleja says he saw this as an opportunity and started the arduous fundraising process. Molecule closed its series A round led by Houston-based Mercury Fund this month.
The other opportunity Soleja says he saw was a new market focus on electricity — a subsector Molecule is very good at working with. About half of Molecule's clients are in this field and electricity — as opposed to oil and gas products — is full of data. Where data comes in weekly or even monthly for O&G, fresh data comes in every 15 minutes for Molecule's electrical clients.
"The commodities industry is looking really hard at electricity as the growth commodity of the 2020s — renewables and conventionally generated electricity," Soleja says. "Everybody in our client base and in the market is looking at electricity. Well, we happen to have more than have of our customer base be in electricity."
Therein lies the opportunity for Molecule, which is also interested in deploying its capital is into engineering to both meet the feature gap and exceed in places where the company is already better, Soleja explains.
"We realized, well that's the place we double down because that's where the economy is going and that's what we're good at. Let's become unquestionably the best at it," he says.
The funds will go toward company expansion. Soleja says he plans to add 50 percent to his team within the next 6 to 12 months and potentially be at 30 to 40 people in a year or two from now. Over the past nine years, Molecule has been growing organically without a centralized focus on sales and marketing.
"We are way below the benchmark for what everyone else spends on sales and marketing. So, we're going to fix that," he says.
Soleja shares more about his raise process and shares advice for his fellow startup founders on the episode. Listen to the full interview below — or wherever you stream your podcasts — and subscribe for weekly episodes.