Dr. Sebastian Groh

Passionate to drive the 5D's fuelling our energy future: Decentralization, Decarbonization, Disruption, Democratization & Digitization! In line with these beliefs, together with his colleagues at SOLshare, Dr. Groh, the Founder and CEO of SOLshare, a cleantech startup based out of Dhaka, Bangladesh that

• built the world’s first peer-to-peer solar energy exchange platform (WEF, 2018)
• raised USD 6.5M to date (50% in equity)
• and was coined the world’s best energy start-up (Free Electrons 2018) & Earthshot Prize Finalist (2021).

Dr. Groh is a 2013 Stanford Ignite Fellow from Stanford Graduate School of Business and holds a PhD from Aalborg University and the Postgraduate School Microenergy Systems at the TU Berlin where he wrote his doctoral thesis on the role of energy in development processes, energy poverty & technical innovations, with a special focus on Bangladesh. He published a book and multiple journal articles on the topic of decentralized electrification in the Global South. He is an Associate Professor at BRAC University in Dhaka (Bangladesh) where he teaches the social entrepreneurship practicum via the Open Society University Network (OSUN). In 2014, Dr. Groh founded SOLshare, acting as its CEO since then. On behalf of SOLshare, he received numerous awards, among them Tech Pioneer ‘18 by the World Economic Forum, Finalist at the Earthshot Prize 2021, and winner of the Zayed Sustainability Prize in 2022. Dr. Groh became an Ashoka Fellow in 2018, a UBS Global Visionary in 2019, and became a Member of the Board and Vice-President at the Bangladesh-German Chamber of Commerce & Industry (BGCCI) in 2021.

SOLshare
SOLshare is an energy-tech company operating in Bangladesh for over six years to provide ICT-based services in clean energy, energy efficiency, and e-mobility in rural and urban areas. SOLshare’s SOLbazaar is the central data hub for future-proof energy infrastructures, such as our peer-to-peer solar electricity trading platform, which allows low-income rural households to access sustainable, affordable, and reliable electricity through aggregated existing under-utilized solar home system assets interlinked into an ICT platform with metering, distribution, and mobile payment system for the efficient allocation of clean electricity in off-grid areas.