Aurora Solar

Aurora Solar is a solar design and sales software company founded in 2013 and headquartered in San Francisco, built by Christopher Hopper and Samuel Adeyemo after a solar project in Kenya took two weeks to install but seven months to plan. Its platform builds a three-dimensional model of a home's roof from aerial imagery and LIDAR, simulates shading and expected production, and generates permit-quality designs and customer proposals — all without sending anyone to the site.

The product line spans Aurora AI, which generates a roof model and proposal-ready design from an address and a utility bill; Design Mode, the full permit-quality engineering tool; Sales Mode for remote quoting; and HelioScope, its commercial and industrial design product. It is the incumbent standard in United States residential solar design, with the company reporting thousands of customers and tens of millions of designs processed.

Two things are worth understanding honestly. First, the split between the machine learning and the physics: computer vision detects roof planes, obstructions, and trees from imagery, which is what makes remote design possible in seconds — but the shading and irradiance accuracy the company is known for comes from ray-traced sun-path simulation, not learned models. The machine learning makes it fast; the physics makes it right. Second, the business is under real strain: Aurora cut staff three times starting in 2024, co-founder Christopher Hopper stepped back to executive chairman in October 2025 with Charlie Herche taking over as chief executive, and the expiry of the United States residential solar tax credit at the end of 2025 pushed the whole industry into a downturn.