Mercatus Closes Series A Funding with Investment from Trepp

Platform Creates Industry's First Credit-Score Equivalent for Solar Energy Projects

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Jan 28, 2014, 08:35 ET

SAN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 28, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Mercatus, Inc., the leading enterprise level investment analysis and decision making platform serving as the core "operating system" for solar energy investors, announces that it has closed its Series A round of financing led by Trepp, LLC, the leading provider of information, analytics and technology to the CMBS, commercial real estate and banking markets. Trepp rounds out other Mercatus Series A investors, including Vision Ridge Partners, Augment Ventures and Shah Capital.

"Trepp's investment in Mercatus is the result of our extensive research into the growing market for comprehensive data and real-time market intelligence for investment in solar energy assets," said Dan Gottlieb, Chief Operating Officer of Trepp, who is now a Board Member of Mercatus. "It was clear that Mercatus was the leader providing the platform and tools to streamline and standardize the investment process. As with Trepp's CMBS, banking and other CRE research, Trepp anticipates being able to help support expanding the availability of Mercatus' non-proprietary data collected in its platform to help accelerate the entry and scale of the capital markets continuing to invest in the solar asset class."

Addressing an Emerging Asset Class

Over the last 18 months, the costs of technology and installation in the renewable energy industry have fallen dramatically, while the costs of financing remain high. Tasked with originating bankable projects, developers are challenged with attracting capital. Energy investors, on the other hand, are lacking the resources, best practices, and in some cases, domain expertise to make expedient decisions, and as a result, are not deploying capital.

The underlying Mercatus platform and process consists of a rich information database and analytics engine consisting of over 10GW of commercial, industrial and utility distributed generation solar assets. This cumulative database tracks 570 unique attributes on each project that has driven the broadest pre-investment dataset available.

"As Wall Street begins to eye the industry as an emerging asset class, a sophisticated enterprise platform solution for end-to-end investment analysis, due diligence, underwriting and securitization will be needed across the growing residential and commercial investor segments to help the industry reach its full potential," said Haresh Patel, CEO of Mercatus. "The Mercatus platform incorporates due diligence and underwriting best practices of the top 50 global financial organizations worldwide and has provided its credit and risk rating to over 1,400 commercial and industrial projects to date. This comprehensive solution allows lenders and capital market investors the ability to harness the strength of the Mercatus investment analysis and analytics platform to ultimately create better liquidity and capital flows for projects or portfolios.

About Mercatus, Inc.
Mercatus is a leading solutions provider for the energy project finance industry, offering a Solar Investment Analysis platform for investors looking to make asset-class portfolio decisions. Mercatus' new standardized approach to the project aggregation, pooling and syndication of individual projects provides the critical transaction interface the buy and sell sides have been waiting for. Mercatus is based in Silicon Valley. For more information visit http://www.gomercatus.com/

About Trepp
Trepp, LLC, founded in 1979, is the leading provider of information, analytics and technology to the CMBS, commercial real estate and banking markets. Trepp provides primary and secondary market participants with the web-based tools and insight they need to increase their operational efficiencies, information transparency and investment performance. Trepp serves its clients with products and services to support trading, research, risk management, surveillance and portfolio management. Trepp is wholly-owned by DMG Information, a division of the Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT).