A rooftop is an excellent place to collect sunlight and a rather poor place to discover that somebody has filled in the wrong form. Ankit Sheoran has built a business around the distance between those two facts. His company, WattMonk, works on the engineering and approvals that let solar installers get on with putting systems into service. The panels are the visible part. Sheoran has chosen to spend his time on the less photogenic arrangements that make them possible.
Ask him to explain that business and he reaches for a surprisingly ordinary image: a shopping centre. In a 2023 conversation with Chris Crowell, he described a collection of services that installers could buy as needed. A customer might need a survey, a proposal, a set of drawings or an engineering review. The ambition was to make commissioning that work feel familiar. The sun may be celestial; the ordering experience need not be.
“Picture our platform like a strip mall for solar engineering”
Ankit Sheoran, 2023
A journey that began closer to the roof
WattMonk arrived in 2019, but Sheoran’s involvement in solar reaches further back. His corporate record includes a directorship at Greenso Solar Technologies beginning in September 2012, a designated partnership at Sunfund Renewable in May 2016 and a directorship at Sungineers Energy in October 2017. That sequence places the current company inside a longer working life in the sector. It also gives his interest in the practical obstacles to adoption some history.
One early episode comes from his Sunfund co-founder, Rajiv Dinesh. In June 2017, Dinesh recalled accompanying his friend Sheoran to a rooftop solar installation in a remote village in Uttarakhand, roughly two years earlier. It was Dinesh’s first exposure to solar. The trip prompted continuing conversations about what was stopping people from adopting a technology that the pair believed had become financially viable.
Their discussions went beyond equipment. Dinesh described an Indian customer learning to compare purchases online, read reviews and shop with more information. Sunfund sought to bring that behaviour to solar: help customers understand their options and connect them with suitable installers. Sheoran supplied experience in solar; Dinesh brought a technology and consulting background. The partnership joined two kinds of knowledge around a familiar customer question: where do I begin?
There is a useful thread here. A rooftop installation led to conversations about access and trust. A platform attempted to organise the choices. Later, WattMonk would organise the work behind those choices. Sheoran’s businesses have addressed different points in the same journey, where a person’s interest in solar has to become a project that somebody can actually deliver.
Boston, a microphone, and a mutual friend
By April 2022, Sheoran was discussing his work with Nico Johnson on SunCast, in an episode recorded around RE+ Northeast in Boston. Johnson credited their mutual friend Anthony Conklin with making the introduction. After getting to know Sheoran and his team over several months, the host finally met him in person. Even in a business concerned with digital workflows, the connection began with somebody saying, in effect, you two should talk.
The episode’s subject was permitting. Its title put the customer’s difficulty first: “Permitting slowing you down?” The question is a compact explanation of the territory Sheoran had picked. Solar adoption contains plenty of grand ambitions, but an installer’s immediate concern can be a project waiting for the next piece of paperwork. A conversation about that wait is a conversation about whether the business can keep moving.
Johnson introduced him as an entrepreneur with more than a decade of global experience. By then, Sheoran had a public story that could travel: a founder working across borders on the delays between a homeowner’s decision and a completed installation. Boston supplied a meeting point. The underlying problem was one that installers could recognise without much introduction.
Making the unglamorous work easier to buy
In October 2022, WattMonk and Sungage Financial announced a partnership through Sungage’s Partner Perks programme. It connected a solar lender’s installer network with WattMonk’s engineering and design services. The announcement described WattMonk as serving more than 150 installers and collecting approximately 200,000 data points a month. Those were company-reported figures at the time, giving a dated glimpse of the operation rather than a permanent label.
Sheoran’s remarks focused on the complexities of financing and the delays involved in closing a sale. The alliance widened the practical help available around a solar project. Engineering, customer finance and sales each have their own requirements; a partnership can make the handoffs less awkward. It was another instance of his attention moving toward the gaps between jobs, where work can sit waiting even when everybody is busy.
The shopping-centre analogy offered the following year made this approach easy to picture. An installer could choose an individual service and follow its progress in one place, with communication available to the engineering team. It was a small act of translation: take work associated with specialist knowledge and make the act of requesting it resemble something customers already understand.
That distinction matters. An accessible ordering process can coexist with demanding engineering work. The customer does not become an electrical designer by clicking a button. What changes is the route to the person who can do the job. Sheoran’s explanation gave the platform a human purpose: make a specialist service easier to reach, commission and discuss.
- LookSite assessment
- DrawPlans & engineering
- SubmitPermits & utility applications
Then the drawings began to change
By late 2024, Sheoran was taking that operational conversation into artificial intelligence. A December webinar brought him together with Deepak Dhingra and Paurush Pandit to discuss AI in solar workflows. Its advertised demonstrations included Framesense for site assessment and Zippy for plan-set creation. The choice of examples was consistent with his earlier work: information collected at the property, followed by the documents needed to move it along.
These are unusually concrete places to test an ambitious technology. A site assessment has to capture useful information. A drawing has to convey a buildable system. An engineering package has to survive review. Calling a tool intelligent settles none of those questions. The useful question for Sheoran’s customers is whether it helps produce the work they need with fewer delays and less manual handling.
In September 2025, he described vision-based AI checking diagrams and tables against local requirements. He also described automated extraction of information from documents and reported that Framesense shortened site surveys by an average of 30 to 45 minutes. These were his account of the tools’ performance. For Zippy, he set an ambition of an eightfold improvement in plan-set creation and revision time while data collection continued.
Sheoran’s stated 2025 goal for improving the time taken to create and revise plan sets with Zippy.
There is a revealing difference between describing a result and setting a target. The former says what a team believes it has done; the latter says what it still wants to prove. Sheoran’s plan-set ambition belongs in that second category. It keeps the story open. A founder can have a clear direction while the measurement remains work in progress.
A pitch among climate founders
In 2025, WattMonk and Sheoran placed third in the ClimateLaunchpad US National Final, joining Ecovaleric and EcoGrains in the top three advancing to the Americas finals. The programme put his solar engineering business alongside other climate ventures. It offered a different audience for a familiar operational argument: making deployment easier is one way to help a climate technology reach more customers.
At a Climate Week NYC gathering, he also spoke about the difficulty of finding investors and businesses working on the same problems. He wished for more places where those conversations could happen. The sentiment fits the route that has accompanied his career: a co-founder on a rooftop trip, a mutual friend arranging a podcast introduction, a financing partnership and a room of climate entrepreneurs.
“I wish there were 10 more events like this around the world.”
Ankit Sheoran, Climate Week NYC interview
The social side of building appears in smaller scenes, too. In July 2024, Aakashdeep Sharma shared a photograph with Sheoran and thanked the founder for the memories. In 2025, the WattMonk office in Gurgaon hosted the first Chai & Chaos mixer organised by Isheta Tangri. A participant credited Sheoran’s initiative and his contributions on product and long-term strategy. Tea, apparently, can have a place beside technical drawings.
The next job is still in the details
WattMonk now presents a broader collection of engineering services and software, including PlanSetIQ, Solar Agent Hub and WattPay. Its current company description puts Sheoran at the centre of a move from a service-led engineering operation toward a product-led business. The company says it supports more than 400 installers across the United States. Its operating vocabulary has expanded; the original concern with project friction remains recognisable.
That continuity gives the profile its shape. Sheoran has worked around installations, customer discovery, partnerships and document automation. The tools have changed with each stage. The recurring interest is in making solar easier for the people trying to deliver it, whether they need a useful connection or a finished engineering package.
A solar founder can spend a career promising a brighter future. Sheoran has made room for the administrative present: the survey, the drawing, the review, the next handoff. It is a patient subject for an entrepreneur to choose. Somewhere between the customer saying yes and the system being switched on, there is work to be done. He keeps finding ways to sell help with it.