Bolong is a clean energy entrepreneur who pioneered a zero upfront cost Rent-to-Own solar model in Southeast Asia, focused on making solar adoption more accessible and scalable. His journey spans venture building across Southeast Asia with growth-stage technology startups, along with experience in management consulting, where he worked on digital transformation and go-to-market strategies.
In a thoughtful interaction with CEO Insights Asia Magazine, Bolong shares sharp insights on financing-led clean energy adoption, highlighting trust, risk structuring, and scalable capital models as the true drivers of solar transformation.
Dive deeper into his perspective; explore the full article for a closer look at how finance is reshaping clean energy adoption.
What were the early signals that led you to prioritize financial architecture over product innovation at GetSolar?
The signals came from listening closely to customers in the early days. Most people considering solar at that point only knew friends or family who had installed systems one or two years prior. But when the pitch required paying $20,000 upfront with a 6-to-7-year payback period, the deeper question was: "Can I trust this system to last that long - and will anyone be there to take care of it if something goes wrong?"
That told us the real problem wasn't financing alone. We had to remove not just the upfront cost, but the uncertainty around maintenance and accountability. Our Rent-to-own models were built to de-risk solar adoption fully. We own the asset, we maintain it, and we stay accountable to the customer for the entire duration.
Could you walk us through the key financial structures, like SPVs and asset-backed models, that made this scalable in practice?
GetSolar is built around an asset-light, recurring revenue model. In the early days, we structured our solar assets into fully off-balance-sheet SPVs. This ring-fenced risk from our operating business and allowed us to grow with venture capital while the market was still discovering what rooftop solar could do at scale.
Separately, these SPVs also created an entry point for asset investors seeking equity exposure to clean energy infrastructure - a different capital pool with different return expectations.
Traditionally, infrastructure capital flows into larger-scale solar assets, but in this case, however, we aggregate smaller residential and commercial rooftop systems into portfolios that deliver outsized returns, while we handle everything else: origination, installation, monitoring, and maintenance. As our track record built and the asset class matured, we scaled up to bring in larger pools of institutional capital and debt.
What are the most common financial blind spots founders have when trying to scale clean energy solutions?
Climate tech is categorically different from software. We are solving physical problems - that means hardware, long asset lives, and a level of capital intensity that most tech investors may not be ready for.
I found that it's important to know how to validate assumptions as lightly as possible, manage cash burn carefully, and only then design for scale. Knowing which type of capital is appropriate at each stage is also important. Equity is right for building and proving the model. Debt is right for scaling assets once cash flows are contracted and predictable. Founders who conflate the two either dilute unnecessarily or take on leverage before the business can support it. Learning to design revenue streams that debt markets recognise - contracted, long-duration, with clear collateral - is one of the most important capabilities a climate founder can develop.
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You’ve worked across consulting and market expansion before building GetSolar, how did those experiences shape your ability to design financing models that balance risk, accessibility, and long-term sustainability?
Consulting instilled first principles thinking in me - solving problems at their core instead of tackling observed symptoms. Market expansion work gave me something different: lived experience of how much context matters, even in markets that look similar from the outside. Singapore and Malaysia are geographically close and culturally adjacent. But the nuances are real - tariff structures, consumer credit profiles, regulatory frameworks, and what actually moves a customer to commit are all meaningfully different.
We're conscious that localisation is a foundational principle for us, not an afterthought. Sales channels, product configurations, contract structures - all of it gets adapted market by market. Assuming homogeneity because two places look similar is a fast way to learn an expensive lesson.
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How do you embed performance guarantees and risk mitigation into your contracts to make the model viable for all stakeholders?
On the customer side, our contractual agreements include performance guarantees - if a system underdelivers against projected generation, we are accountable. This ensures we have a direct financial incentive to install quality systems and maintain them properly throughout the contract life.
On the capital provider side, risk mitigation sits in the asset structure itself - diversified portfolios, geographic spread, contracted revenue streams, and documented payment histories. We retain operational control throughout, which means investors aren't passively exposed to underperformance. The maintenance component is not just a service offering, it also functions as a credit enhancement mechanism - investors know the assets are being actively managed, which supports the underwriting and reduces default risk.
The problem we're fundamentally solving in the market is one of trust, and it's important that our structure reflects it too.
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What advice would you share with industry leaders to leverage financing effectively as a tool for large-scale impact?
Climate tech businesses are capital intensive by nature. In my opinion, the most important thing a climatetech founder can do is understand the difference between equity and debt, and deploy each appropriately. Equity buys time to prove a model. Debt scales what is already proven. Using them in the wrong order and not having a scalable structure to continue to raise and manage capital is one of the most common and costly mistakes in this sector.
Beyond that, the goal should be designing projects that are inherently de-risked - contracted revenue, clear collateral, operational accountability baked in from the start. When you do that well, you stop depending solely on climate-aligned investors and start becoming attractive to mainstream institutional capital.