Google for Startups connected Andrea and her team to a supportive community, right when they needed it. As Andrea says, “it was the most helpful part of Residency: a healthy support system of founders, Googlers, and mentors that we could ask for help from any day of the week.” She adds that managing an entire startup is very different from managing a singular team, the latter of which she was highly accustomed to already from her time at her previous company opening offices in multiple countries. “When you’re a startup, you feel a lot of loneliness sometimes because you’re always trying to solve new problems. But now I can ask other founders for help and insight.” For Andrea, the loneliness included being an anomaly in the sustainable energy industry: being a woman CEO for an energy tech company. During Residency, she met a host of fellow women founders passionate about their startups—many of whom she still calls upon, often for advice and celebration. Andrea and the RatedPower team are now active members of the Google for Startups Alumni community opening up their network to even more founders to share and exchange knowledge.

“Being part of the Google for Startups Residency program has given us the necessary push to start scaling our business,” Andrea says. RatedPower learned how to implement Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) into their team’s yearly vision as well as their quarter-to-quarter plans. The team tripled, and today it is made up of more than 30 full time employees from 10 different nationalities, half of the team being women. During the program, they achieved one of their greatest achievements to date: the European Commission awarded them close to 2 million euros in non-refundable funds in the prestigious Phase 2 of the Horizon 2020 SME Instrument. Along with Google Analytics and Ads, which RatedPower uses to increase their customer conversion rates, they also use Google Earth for their software, allowing their engineers and software designers to design and implement solar plants anywhere in the world.

The RatedPower software is available in five languages (English, French, Portuguese, Italian and Spanish), has now been used in over 130 countries and claims more than 10,000 projects completed in just three years since the company officially started. This translates into 800 GW of power developed - the equivalent of 9 million households. This means an annual reduction of 12 million tons of CO2 and an annual decrease of 18 million oil barrels. For Andrea and her cofounders, the success of RatedPower only illustrates the desire for better and more sustainable energy throughout the world and they are grateful to be at the forefront of a solution to that desire. She says, “We don’t see ourselves as that special - we’re just doing what we think we ought to be doing to help our planet.”