The energy market in Mexico presents significant challenges for businesses, particularly micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), due to high costs, unreliable supply, and limited access to financing. Electricity prices place a heavy financial burden on businesses, while frequent power outages disrupt operations, damage machinery, and spoil perishable goods. This is particularly problematic for mom-and-pop shops, small manufacturers, and other businesses that lack backup power solutions.

Many MSMEs resort to informal energy sources, such as illegal power connections known as diablitos. While these connections reduce costs in the short term, they prevent business owners from accessing credit to cover energy costs, formalizing their operations, and ensuring a stable energy supply. The solar energy market, though a viable alternative, remains highly fragmented, with limited integration between customers, manufacturers, installers, and financial institutions, making the adoption process slow, costly, and difficult to scale.

Solfium simplifies this process by offering financing, installation, and long-term support, making solar adoption seamless for businesses. By working with financial institutions, the company removes upfront cost barriers and enables businesses to transition to solar with immediate savings. Accion Emerge is proud to invest in Solfium and support them in their journey to provide MSMEs across the country with safe, reliable power.

Solving pain points across the entire solar ecosystem

Solfium’s primary customers are MSMEs, which form the backbone of the Mexican economy and are essential players in corporate supply chains. These businesses face some of the highest electricity costs in the country, directly impacting their profitability and competitiveness. These high energy costs, coupled with limited financing options, prevent many small businesses from investing in solar, despite the clear economic benefits.

Solfium addresses this issue by enabling MSMEs to access cost-saving solar solutions, reducing their dependence on expensive grid electricity.  Beyond cost savings, Solfium addresses another critical pain point in the solar ecosystem by ensuring local installers have access to job-matching opportunities, many of whom are independent contractors or small businesses themselves. The company actively invests in technical training programs to equip these professionals with the necessary skills and certifications to expand the solar market.

Corporate partnerships as the gateway to MSMEs

Large corporations are increasingly focused on decarbonizing their supply chains; however, they cannot reach Net Zero emissions without transitioning their suppliers and distributors to renewable energy. Solfium partners with corporates to integrate solar energy into their supply chains, using these relationships as an entry point to reach thousands of MSME partners, such as small convenience stores that sell consumer goods.

This approach creates a scalable, mutually beneficial impact model. MSMEs gain access to affordable solar power, reducing their costs, while corporates achieve supply chain decarbonization, reinforcing their long-term sustainability goals. Corporate partners also use Solfium’s services for installations within their own facilities, creating an additional revenue stream.

Bridging the financial divide

Solfium has positioned itself as a comprehensive solar energy platform by integrating a curated network of service providers into its ecosystem. The company allows MSMEs not only to access high-quality solar solutions but also to benefit from a broader set of adjacent services — including financing, payroll lending, carbon credit certification, and green mortgages — all orchestrated within a single user experience. Solfium’s fully integrated platform also offers up-to-date energy usage information, installation guidance, and long-term support, making solar adoption seamless for businesses. “We want to bring clean, affordable energy to every corner of society, and our corporate partnerships enable MSMEs to access more financing solutions to invest in solar energy,” says Andres Friedman, CEO and Co-founder of Solfium.

Scaling impact in Mexico’s solar sector

MSMEs account for 99.8 percent of all businesses in Mexico, employing roughly 27 million people and accounting for roughly 52 percent of the country’s GDP. Despite this outsized role in the economy, these same MSMEs face the steepest barriers to growth, including unstable energy connectivity and expensive energy costs. Solfium aims to alleviate these financial constraints, connecting MSMEs with solar and solar financing, while also making measurable impact across the climate space.

Until Q1 2025, the company has helped its partners reduce CO2 emissions by more than 960,000 tons, all while producing over 108 GWh of solar energy, helping to power hundreds of small businesses all along the corporate value chain. Connection to solar has helped save Solfium customers close to $670 million USD in energy costs.

We believe Accion’s investment and strategic support will help Solfium expand its market reach, enhance its solar product offerings, and fill leadership positions focused on solar energy adoption. We’re excited to work with Solfium as it continues to harness clean energy technology to reduce operating costs for MSMEs across Mexico.