Deep Chakraborty Is Building Memory for the Rooftop

On his first trip to America, Deep Chakraborty got off a train carrying one piece of luggage and a sitar. A friend collected him at Penn State. The image survives only in memory because nobody took a photograph. The ticket survives too, fixed to the sitar case where Chakraborty still keeps it. It is a charmingly inefficient archive: paper attached to an instrument made from wood and a gourd, preserving the beginning of a career that would eventually become preoccupied with better records.

The sitar is more than luggage in this story. Chakraborty grew up in India, born in Kolkata, in a family that traveled. His father was an entrepreneur with an international outlook and a long connection to Germany. Deep and his brother learned to imagine work across borders. He also learned Indian classical music and still plays. A sitar carries two layers of strings: one is struck, while the other vibrates in sympathy. Resonance is action remembered elsewhere.

That is also a neat description of the business Chakraborty now runs. Enact Solar has two sides. Professionals use its software to design, price, sell and deliver solar and battery projects. Owners use it to see generation, consumption and financial results after installation. The design makes a promise; the operating system answers back. Chakraborty calls it the ability to “measure what you predict in solar.”

First, learn the whole machine

Chakraborty did not begin in software. At IIT Kharagpur, he was initially assigned metallurgy. He wanted to build things, found himself unmoved by the prospect of a life in steel, and changed to mechanical engineering. A scholarship then took him to Penn State for a master’s focused on manufacturing simulation. His professors encouraged work with industry. He chose factories over a doctorate.

Chrysler made that education physical. Its rotational program moved young engineers through six-month assignments. Chakraborty learned the car by sections: suspension, body, aerodynamics, manufacturing plants. Later came product management, marketing, dealer programs and strategy. He worked on the Dodge Nitro, which shared its underpinnings with the Jeep Liberty. One machine could hold two public identities, provided the parts and process agreed.

An MBA at the University of Michigan filled in a different diagram. Engineering had taught him how to make a product. Business school asked how to hit a sales target, choose a channel and invest in the right marketing. He liked the immediacy of action-based learning: wrestle with a problem in class at night, then carry an answer into work the next morning.

After nearly a decade around cars, Chakraborty joined Roland Berger and moved with his wife and young child to Munich. He advised automotive companies as the industry explored electric vehicles, swappable batteries and unfamiliar form factors. The ideas were absorbing; the market was stubborn. He began to wonder whether his entrepreneurial appetite had chosen a machine too expensive to reinvent.

“I always wanted to build something of my own.”Deep Chakraborty

The company next door

Then geography offered a plot twist. Next to Roland Berger’s office sat Centrosolar, a German solar company preparing to enter the United States. It wanted somebody with American experience who could build a business. Chakraborty became the first U.S. hire. The parent company supplied capital; he supplied customers, a team and, eventually, a profit-and-loss operation that required less help from Munich.

He describes the experience as a gentler entrance to entrepreneurship. Payroll did not depend on his next funding meeting. Experiments still faced limits. When something worked, the parent funded it again. In under four years, he says, the North American business grew from zero to $30 million in annual sales across more than 25 states. It taught him discipline and gave him the confidence to attempt the version without a corporate floor.

It also gave him a close view of solar’s awkward customer journey. A homeowner was not merely buying panels. The customer was placing a small power plant on a building, navigating roof constraints, equipment choices, permits, financing and uncertain future savings. The hardware improved while the transaction remained a relay race.

The handoff is the product

In 2013, German solar subsidies were cut sharply and Centrosolar came under pressure. Chakraborty had accumulated roughly 15 years of corporate experience and five in solar. At a conference, he reconnected with Manasij Kar, a friend from IIT Kharagpur who had been leading a solar business in India. They had approached the same industry from different continents and reached a similar conclusion: the missing opportunity was not another panel. It was software for the process around the panel.

Both quit. Enact began in 2014 with a customer question: how could buying and owning solar become more rewarding and predictable? Early digital products helped customers make decisions. Then reality widened the brief. A handsome interface could not install anything. Good local installers, dependable equipment, finance and execution had to meet inside the same journey.

The company was early. Chakraborty now places the stronger market lift around 2017 and 2018, after solar had become more common and prices had fallen. In the meantime, the founders had to build software, recruit developers, find the right market and raise capital before all three lined up. His advice to newer founders is unusually free of incense: make sure the first problem has a large enough revenue stream, then pace the build to meet the market’s adoption curve.

Enact’s response became a two-sided platform. From satellite imagery, an installer can lay out a system, specify equipment, model generation and savings, and turn the result into an interactive proposal. Once the project is operating, the customer can compare actual energy and financial outcomes with those earlier predictions. In 2022, the company raised an $11.5 million Series A led by Energy Growth Momentum. By its tenth anniversary, Enact reported professionals in more than 35 countries.

A service record for sunlight

The more interesting ambition begins after the sale. Solar systems last for decades; households do not remain frozen around them. Owners add electric vehicles, batteries and heat pumps. Utility rates change. Equipment ages. Houses are sold. The next owner may inherit panels without inheriting a clear account of what they are, what they produced, what was spent or which warranty still applies.

Chakraborty reaches for the used-car comparison. A vehicle can carry a history into its next transaction. A rooftop power system should be able to do the same. This is where monitoring becomes more than a dashboard with a pleasing green curve. It becomes continuity: the original design, the actual output, the maintenance events, the upgrades and the economics held in one place.

In January 2026, Enact acquired PVComplete, whose tools span web-based layouts and AutoCAD-integrated engineering. The combination brings construction documents, bills of materials and precise design closer to Enact’s proposal and asset-management data. Chakraborty’s stated aim is a feedback loop in which operating projects inform engineering. A fault discovered years later can become an input to a better system drawn tomorrow.

“For the first time, insights from thousands of operating solar projects will flow directly back into the engineering and design phase.”Deep Chakraborty

The grid becomes a conversation

Chakraborty’s larger idea is what he calls the “Internet of energy.” Electricity has traditionally moved outward from central plants through poles and wires. Rooftop solar, batteries and electric appliances complicate that line. A building can consume, produce and store. The grid remains essential, but its role becomes a balancing act among many active nodes rather than a one-way delivery route.

The thought is partly personal. Growing up in India in the 1980s, Chakraborty knew unreliable grid power and a home battery with an inverter. The components are not new to him. What has changed is their combination: solar generation, storage, control software and a customer who increasingly needs to know whether the car will be charged by morning.

This makes reliability intimate. The software that once estimated savings may now help an owner decide when to store electricity, when to use it and when an asset needs attention. A second battery or panel upgrade becomes another chapter in the same record. The business opportunity expands, but so does the obligation to keep the promise legible.

Through all the machines and markets, Chakraborty returns to people. “The main thing in business is the people,” he has said, crediting the early Centrosolar team with making that venture work. Public recommendations describe him as grounded, positive, ambitious and pragmatic. His own language is quieter: he repeatedly says he was lucky, then explains the preparation that allowed luck to find somewhere useful to land.

The old train ticket on the sitar case does not need an app. It has one owner, one memory and no complicated handoff. A solar roof is less fortunate. It can outlast the salesperson, the installer, the app and the first family beneath it. Chakraborty’s work asks a practical question with a poetic edge: what if the sunlight leaves a history?