For energy and industrial companies that have successfully established a geographic foothold, the next question is often: where to next?
The answer is rarely straightforward. A software platform built around ERCOT's competitive market structure doesn't automatically translate to PJM. Abusiness model refined in Western Europe may run into entirely different permitting regimes, procurement timelines, and customer expectations in Australia. And unlike a failed product launch or a missed quarter, a poorly executed geographic expansion is hard to unwind.
Yet for companies at the Endurance stage — those that have found product-market fit, achieved capital efficiency, and are now ready to build lasting platforms — geographic expansion remains a compelling growth lever. It can unlock new revenue streams, and serve as a strategic hedge against the cycles and shifts that define energy and industrial markets.
As the latest edition to our Scaling for Endurance series, we're offering our practical advice to unlocking growth through new geographies. We outline five principles for executing this expansion in climate, energy, and industrial markets, drawn from our work with Endurance-stage companies navigating exactly this challenge. We also sit down with David Trainavicius, Founder and CEO of PVcase, a company that started in Lithuania and now serves solar developers across 80+ countries, to hear how disciplined sequencing, operational readiness, and a clear-eyed read on market asymmetries turned a regional tool into a global platform.
Read the rest of the Scaling for Endurance series:
Wholesale energy markets are a prime example of the complexity of geographic expansion. From Australia to Germany to Texas, market structures operate under different rules, timelines, pricing constructs, and mechanisms for customer participation. A company built in ERCOT (a competitive wholesale market with nodal pricing systems) may assume it can replicate its model in PJM or Europe. In reality, procurement processes, access to customer usage data, and participation paths for demand-side flexibility can differ substantially across regions.
Energize’s recommendation: When scaling into new energy markets, evaluate transferability by regulatory construct rather than proximity. The most successful expansions are into markets whose operating logic rhymes with a company’s original territory. Analyze data availability, regulatory constructs, and market dynamics (such as real-time or capacity design in the case of wholesale power markets) before exploring an expansion opportunity.
Policy constraints can reshape the landscape of critical industries, shifting energy usage economics or infrastructure deployment timelines. But the impacts of those regulations can vary depending on a company’s value proposition. For example, building efficiency software may see a surge in demand when unfavorable energy policies drive rates upward. Conversely, companies chasing geographies with favorable renewable deployment policies may need to consider risks of a crowded interconnection queue.
Energize’s recommendation: Interpret policy through a multi-layered lens of customer sentiment, potential return on investment of expansion (including expected timelines), and the risk of the potential impacts of policy shifts in either direction. Expansion planning should incorporate second and third-order effects of policy change, including how price signals may shift ROI calculations, how incentives translate into buying behaviors, and where local volatility may create tailwinds. A market that looks challenging on paper may, in practice, be more favorable for your specific solution than a market with superficially supportive headlines.
Activating a new geography is an exponential lift. It introduces finance, legal, HR, security, customer support, and product complexities all at once. Localized data-residency rules can require separate software instances or infrastructure. Customer success teams may need to provide support in local languages and in-region time zones, especially when serving global accounts. Transfer pricing and currency considerations add additional layers of operational lift.
Energize’s recommendation: Treat geographic expansion as a company-wide initiative, not a sales experiment. Before entering, validate that finance operations, data-hosting infrastructure, customer success, and talent systems can support multi-region workflows. Expansion is one of the few strategic moves that cannot be easily unwound, and success depends on readiness across functions and detailed execution, not enthusiasm from growth teams alone.
When it comes time to move, a team must consider not only about how the firm will expand, but who will lead that expansion. It can be tempting to treat a new market like a satellite experiment, sending junior talent to warm up a space and to build customer traction. But in energy and industrial markets, where customer trust is paramount, this can quickly backfire. In our portfolio, we’ve seen the highest success come from executive-led expansions, where senior talent moves into a new geography to demonstrate a company’s conviction and staying-power in the region.
Energize’s recommendation: Ensure the first person in a new geography is either an executive or someone who has built a market from scratch before. Expansion relies on earning trust within long sales cycles, shaping local go-to-market strategies, and responding in real time to cultural norms and customer expectations. Senior on-the-ground ownership accelerates learning and dramatically improves the odds of establishing product-market fit.
National and regional energy markets can be cyclical. Power prices, procurement timelines, and renewable deployment vary year to year. Companies concentrated in one geography can experience sudden compression in demand due to regulatory changes or market shocks. By contrast, companies with exposure across multiple construct types, such as capacity markets and energy-only markets, gain resilience by balancing conditions across regions.
Energize’s recommendation: Treat expansion as a strategic hedge. While readiness should drive timing, geographic diversity should operate to stabilize revenue and reduce exposure to market swings – not double down on similar risks and variabilities. The strongest Endurance-stage companies build portfolios of markets that move on different cycles but share similar operational DNA.
PVcase is a solar project development platform that accelerates planning and engineering for utility-scale and C&I solar projects. Although founded in Lithuania, PVcase serves a global customer base across 80+ countries. To reach its next stage of growth, the company recognized that its home market could not support the scale of opportunity ahead and that expanding into larger, more dynamic markets would be critical to its trajectory. We sat down with David Trainavicius, Founder and CEO of PVcase, to hear, in his words, how the team executed on their geographic expansion strategy.
Energize Capital: How did you know it was time to invest in geographic expansion?
David Trainavicius: We saw two things at the same time: first, the macro trend, solar development accelerating globally, not just in North America and Western Europe; and second, our own penetration data showing that PVcase was heavily adopted in a handful of mature markets but still barely present in fast growing regions.
When you compare industry level growth curves with your internal adoption curves, the gap becomes obvious. Our platform solves universal bottlenecks in site selection and engineering, and we realized we could either wait for those markets to mature, or shape them ourselves. The TAM wasn’t just growing; our relative share was underweighted in several regions where utility scale development was ramping quickly. That asymmetry was the signal.
EC: What operational steps did PVcase take to prepare to expand?
DT: We started by tightening fundamentals: product readiness, support readiness, and workflow consistency. Solar development may look different country to country, but the engineering pain points are similar, so we invested early in standardizing our core workflows, site selection, design, and yield to provide a seamless workflow so they could scale globally.
A key step was our 2023 acquisition of siting software platform Anderson Optimization, which allowed us to bring advanced site selection capabilities into the PVcase platform. That move transformed us from a sole design solution into an end-to-end development environment. It also made geographic expansion more viable: once site selection and grid capacity analysis were built into the product, we could enter new regions with a stronger value proposition and a more complete workflow for developers.
On the commercial side, we built regional playbooks: localized content, local onboarding sequences, and partner led routes where that made more sense than direct sales. Internally, we aligned product roadmaps with expansion priorities so engineering and design teams weren’t surprised by regional requirements. And we upgraded revenue ops, billing, support SLAs, and training to ensure the company could handle growth in multiple regions without operational drag.
EC: What nuances did you have to think about in terms of different target countries or regions? How did that analysis influence where and when you expanded?
DT: We evaluate markets on three lenses: macro potential, adoption readiness, and friction. Macro potential is classic: pipeline growth, policy environment, investment flows. Adoption readiness is more specific to PVcase, digital maturity of developers and EPCs, grid connection sophistication, and the presence of teams that actually value engineering precision. Friction refers to the cost of operating there: data availability, language requirements, sales cycle complexity, and the presence of entrenched competitors or legacy practices.
That framework naturally pushes us toward large, high growth but underpenetrated markets first. For example, regions moving aggressively toward utility scale solar but still relying on manual or fragmented design workflows represent outsized opportunity for us. Conversely, markets with strong solar growth but low digital maturity may be high potential long term, but not immediate priorities. This is how we sequence expansion, biggest TAM gaps with the lowest adoption friction go first.
EC: What were some challenges that might be unique to energy or industrial markets, and how did you address them?
DT: Energy is not a copy-paste industry. Every region has its own interconnection rules, permitting workflows, grid constraints, procurement standards, and engineering habits. For a platform like ours, that means two things: you need local data, and you need the product to be flexible enough to enable engineers to make custom strategic choices without fragmenting the codebase.
Another challenge is the speed mismatch: software moves fast, but energy procurement and permitting do not. That affects customer expectations, onboarding, and sales cycles. We addressed these points by prioritizing early customer partnerships, getting a handful of credible developers or EPCs in each region to work closely with us, and by architecting the product to support variability in inputs (terrain formats, grid data conventions, yield model assumptions) without needing region specific forks. This balance keeps us scalable while still respecting regulatory nuance.
EC: What recommendations would you have for other mature climate startups executing their own geographic expansion strategies?
DT: Don’t chase flags on a map, chase asymmetries. Start where your product solves a large, urgent bottleneck that the local market hasn’t fully recognized yet. Validate expansion with two numbers: your penetration vs. total market activity. If the delta is big, expansion is justified; if it’s small, you’re probably forcing it.
Second, align product, data, and commercial strategy before entering a new region. Many climate or industrial software companies expand only commercially and then get stuck because the product can’t handle regional requirements.
Third, build credibility locally. You need a few strong anchor customers in each market who can speak to your value in their regional context. Without that, even a good product will be perceived as foreign.
Finally, sequence expansion. Climate markets are lumpy, policy driven, and slow to standardize. You can burn a lot of resources if you expand based on enthusiasm rather than on structured penetration and friction analysis.
Read more about Energize Capital's investment in PVcase here.
Geographic expansion can be one of the most powerful tools for climate and industrial technology companies reaching the profitable growth, or Endurance, stage. But a successful expansion requires fluency in market design, sensitivity to policy nuance, operational readiness, the right leadership, and a strategic understanding of where your company has a true right to win.
Our Endurance strategy is built around these realities. We partner with established, capital-efficient companies ready to expand with precision and offer the expertise, networks, and functional support required to scale into new geographies, and succeed there.
Check out the rest of our Scaling for Endurance series, where we explore the strategies that enable later-stage climate and energy companies to build enduring platforms, from operational maturity to commercial expansion and disciplined M&A.
