In the bustling landscape of technological innovation and entrepreneurial resolve, the Malaysian climate-tech startup Doople has carved a distinct success curve. With an impressive 48x growth rate, Doople's journey is a powerful testament to its relentless pursuit of progress and its pivotal transformation from a simple IoT experiment into a leading solar EPCC powerhouse.
How a team of founders, a simple IoT prototype, and a key strategic pivot transformed Doople into a leading end-to-end solar EPCC company.
In 2019, Doople began as a small climate-tech experiment, born from a trio of founders who believed that better data could unlock massive gains in the solar industry. Fast forward four years, and that conviction has fueled a powerful evolution: Doople has seamlessly woven its IoT expertise into a full-fledged Engineering, Procurement, Construction, and Commissioning (EPCC) offering. Today, the company not only provides gateways and cloud subscriptions but also builds and operates solar projects that deliver measurable uptime, yield, and carbon impact.
“I felt a strong pull to build something meaningful in the fight against climate change… That was the spark for Doople,” says Mr. Idzat, the company's CEO.
The original challenge was both simple and frustrating. Solar asset owners were struggling with scattered data from multiple inverter brands. Their O&M (Operations & Maintenance) teams lacked remote visibility, and countless opportunities for efficiency were being missed. Doople's early mission was to address this with a compact yet ambitious solution: to build IoT hardware and cloud software that would give energy stakeholders the tools to “understand, act, and save in real time.” The result was a gateway designed to communicate with a wide range of devices, paired with a cloud dashboard that translated raw data into actionable insights.
The Product in One Sentence: Doople connects solar plants to the cloud with a gateway + analytics platform, delivering actionable insights that help operators maximize uptime, improve yield, and cut costs.
Doople's first customers were small solar asset owners who were desperate for unified visibility across their sites. The founders deployed a prototype gateway that could aggregate data from various inverter protocols into a single, user-friendly dashboard. Landing that first sale was a pivotal moment of validation. "It felt like the idea was no longer just a dream, it was proof that we were solving a real pain point in the market," Idzat recalls. The prototype had evolved from a concept into a tangible solution that saved time, reduced site visits, and delivered a clear revenue impact.
Initially, Doople’s revenue model combined hardware sales with software subscriptions. However, by 2021, the founders recognized a critical market demand in Malaysia: customers didn’t just want monitoring; they wanted a trusted partner who could deliver end-to-end solar solutions. This realization led to a strategic and audacious pivot. Doople shifted its focus to EPCC, building projects themselves and embedding their IoT monitoring technology into every installation. This decision to move from a pure-play monitoring vendor to a comprehensive project developer was the catalyst that fueled their exponential growth.
"Don't cling to your first idea too tightly," Idzat advises. "Listen to your customers, and when the right pivot comes, lean into it with everything you have."
Doople’s key differentiator lies in its hybrid DNA. While many competitors are either software-only or hardware-only, Doople was designed to bridge both. By owning the full stack, from the gateway that captures data to the cloud system that translates it into business value. Doople can troubleshoot remotely, provide predictive alerts, and, crucially, stand behind the delivered performance of the projects it builds. The features that deliver the fastest ROI are predictive alerts and remote diagnostics, which allow O&M teams to catch issues before they escalate, preventing costly downtime and protecting yield. One early deployment improved uptime by an impressive 7% in the first year, translating into significant additional energy sales and O&M savings.
Scalability was a core tenet from the start. Their gateways are plug-and-play, and cloud onboarding is standardized. Their hybrid support model combines remote diagnostics for speed with local partners for on-the-ground service, allowing them to expand nationwide without compromising quality.
Doople started with just three founders who wore many hats, with mission-critical roles in firmware engineering, cloud software development, and field deployment. Building robust hardware that could survive brutal site conditions was a major challenge, as was fundraising in a market cautious of hardware-heavy businesses. The team overcame this by iterating quickly with customers, proving their technology worked, and leveraging early traction to secure support from accelerators like NEXEA.
Doople measures its impact through three key metrics: uptime improvements, yield gains, and carbon reductions. For every megawatt they monitor, customers not only earn more revenue but also avoid an estimated 100 tons of CO₂ annually, beautifully aligning financial returns with environmental benefits.
Looking ahead, Doople plans to scale beyond Malaysia and into the broader Southeast Asian market. Their product roadmap includes expanding into battery storage analytics, AI-driven predictive maintenance, and EV charging integration. The vision is to become the region’s go-to partner for clean energy solutions, not just monitoring them, but delivering and guaranteeing their performance.
