Invisible Giant
Hundreds of millions of people, off the grid, powered.
In the Global South, the largest utilities are the ones that never laid a wire. They arrived as a solar box on the roof.
For hundreds of millions of homes, the grid was never going to arrive. So the power company came in a box.
Sun King and d.light are among the largest utilities most people have never heard of. Sun King's off-grid solar has reached around 50 million people, and d.light more than 190 million across Africa and Asia - a panel, a battery, and a few lights, paid off in small instalments on a phone. Sun King estimates nearly three in ten Kenyan homes now run on one of its products.
The insight: the socket comes before the grid, and everything downstream needs the power first.
In the Global South, the biggest power companies are the ones that never laid a wire.
Source: Sun King, 2025; d.light, 2024-2025.