Jason
Steinberg

A whole career spent looking up at solar roofs

Jason Steinberg runs a company built on a simple, stubborn idea: the fastest way to design a solar array is not to send a person up a ladder with a tape measure. It is to fly a drone.

As CEO of Scanifly, Steinberg leads a software platform that turns drone imagery into detailed 3D models of a rooftop. Solar companies use those models to lay out panels, simulate how much power the array will produce, run shading analysis, and generate permit-ready plan sets. The pitch is efficiency, but underneath it is something he takes personally: safety. Every design produced from a drone flight is a roof climb that a technician never has to make.

That focus is not abstract for him. Steinberg's first job in the industry, back in 2009, was installing solar arrays on rooftops in New Jersey. He knows what it feels like to carry equipment up to a second-story eave in July. When he talks about reducing site visits and worker risk, he is describing work he has done with his own hands.

What makes Steinberg unusual as a founder-executive is the range of vantage points he has occupied inside a single sector. After installing panels, he moved into data, joining Bloomberg and its clean-energy research arm, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, as a lead North American researcher tracking renewable-energy projects, manufacturing, and investment. He learned the industry as a spreadsheet - who was building what, and with whose money.

Then he moved to the money itself. From 2014 to 2018 he worked in investment banking at CohnReznick Capital, where he helped finance more than $3 billion of renewable energy projects and companies. He earned the CFA charter along the way, one of the more demanding credentials in finance. He also holds a NABCEP PV Associate certification, the solar industry's own mark of technical competence. It is a rare combination: someone equally at home in a capital-markets meeting and on a job site.

Why drones, and why now

The problem Scanifly attacks is boring in the way that expensive problems often are. Before a solar array goes on a roof, someone has to measure the roof, note its pitch and orientation, find the vents and chimneys, and figure out how the sun moves across it through the year. Get any of that wrong and the design has to be redone. In solar, a redesign is not just annoying - it is a change order, a delay, and a hit to margin.

Steinberg has been blunt about the phrase he built a company to eliminate. On accuracy, he points to a comfortable lie that installers tell themselves - that a rough measurement is "accurate enough." It usually is not. The gap between "close" and "correct" is where profit quietly leaks out of a solar business.

Scanifly's answer is to capture the roof once, precisely, from the air. A drone flies the site, the software stitches the imagery into a photorealistic 3D model, and the design happens against real geometry rather than a satellite guess. Steinberg has argued this on industry stages: on the SunCast podcast, he described how the approach can compress the permitting process from roughly three weeks down to three days. In an industry where soft costs - the paperwork and labor around the panels - now rival the cost of the hardware itself, shaving weeks off a project is real money.

The educator streak

Steinberg does not keep his thinking inside the company. He hosts a podcast, "When Life Gives You Lumens," where he interviews people across the solar business about workforce development, sales, and the practical mechanics of scaling. The title is a pun - lumens are a unit of light - but the intent is serious. Solar is booming, and Steinberg keeps returning to the question of how an industry grows fast without breaking, and how it trains enough skilled people to keep up.

He is also a frequent guest elsewhere, showing up on shows like SunCast and the Solar Maverick Podcast to make the case for remote and drone-based design. The through-line in these conversations is consistent: solar's next gains will come less from cheaper panels and more from smarter, safer workflows.

A New Jersey company with roots to match

Scanifly is headquartered in Hightstown, New Jersey - the same state where Steinberg first climbed onto a solar roof more than a decade ago. Founded in 2015, the company raised a $10 million Series A round in early 2022, part of more than $12 million in total funding, and has grown into a team building tools used by solar enterprises to digitize field data and automate the design workflow.

Steinberg's education mirrors the global, sustainability-minded bent of his career. He studied at Muhlenberg College, graduating in 2011 with a focus on finance, business administration, and sustainability studies, and spent time at New York University, Maastricht University in the Netherlands, and BNU-HKBU United International College in China. The common thread across three continents was the same subject he would spend his working life on: how to make clean energy actually work at scale.

For all the finance polish, the most telling fact about Steinberg is the one at the start of his resume, not the CFA at the top of it. He is a solar lifer who happened to pick up a banker's toolkit along the way. That is why the drone pitch lands when he makes it. He is not an outsider optimizing an industry from a distance. He learned it from the roof.

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