> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.foundedbywomen.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Annelen Kahl of SUNWELL on Taking Solar Planning From Alpine Slopes to Farmland - URL: https://www.foundedbywomen.org/women-who-lead/annelen-kahl-of-sunwell-on-taking-solar-planning-from-alpine-slopes-to-farmland/ - Published: 2026-11-11T06:12:24.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-11T06:12:24.000Z - Author: Editorial team - Tags: Women Who Lead Annelen Kahl is the co-founder and CEO of [SUNWELL](https://www.sunwell.tech/?ref=foundedbywomen.org), a Swiss company based in Sion that builds simulation software for solar planning in complex terrain. The team started in alpine PV, working with Swiss utilities on more than 25 projects while developing its own software in parallel. That software, Lumi4D, simulates and optimizes electricity yield, crop health and finances together on a single GPU-accelerated cloud platform, making it possible to compare thousands of designs at once. It is now being built into a scalable B2B SaaS for AgriPV, where solar installations and farming share the same land and the same sunlight. In this Q&A, Annelen shares why SUNWELL is moving from alpine PV to AgriPV, what farmers and project developers struggle with most, and where the company is heading as its Pre-Seed round opens. > Know a woman leader doing incredible work? The Founded by Women Awards are open for entries - founders, executives, professionals and changemakers alike. Showcase your story, gain visibility and connect with a community of leaders. 👉 [foundedbywomen.org/awards](https://www.foundedbywomen.org/awards/) --- ### Q: You started in alpine PV and are now moving into AgriPV. What led to that decision? Working in alpine PV was a temporary opportunity that we seized in order to go bootstrapped and to immediately gain customer traction. Originally, we had set out on a more traditional startup path, looking for grants and investors to build a SaaS right away. But after two years the Solar Express came along, a subsidy scheme by the Swiss Federation to incentivize ground-mounted PV installations in alpine environments and address Switzerland’s winter energy gap. Due to our unique expertise with snow and complex terrain, we were approached by several Swiss utilities that asked us to help them with their projects. So we decided to work as a consultancy for three years, completed over 25 projects, earned revenue of over CHF 0.5 million and developed our software in parallel. Now the Solar Express is over and our simulation tool Lumi4D has matured such that we want to transition it from an internally used tool to a scalable B2B SaaS. Alpine PV is a very small and geographically constrained market, too small for a SaaS. So we are adding AgriPV as our target market, since it holds similar challenges for the planning and design process but has a much larger reach. It is a young but very dynamic market with strong growth projections. The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) published a study that concluded it would take less than 1% of the available farmland to cover all electricity needs. So the potential is huge, but projects are currently developing only slowly because designing them is complex. ### Q: What do farmers and project developers struggle with most when planning AgriPV, and how does your software help them? Conventional solar planning only needs to optimize electricity and cost. In AgriPV, electricity yield and crop health compete for the same resource: sunlight. So every change in installation geometry affects electricity production, crop yield and financial performance at once. Yet all of these effects are currently assessed separately using different tools, models and experts, which leads to a slow and iterative design process. As a result, project developers explore too few alternatives, detect problems late and make decisions based on incomplete information. That’s why we have developed Lumi4D as an integrated tool that simulates and optimizes electricity, crops and finances together on one single platform. In addition to solving the problem of a fragmented workflow, Lumi4D has overcome the trade-off between speed and accuracy that current tools suffer from. We have developed our tool from the ground up for GPU-accelerated cloud infrastructure, which makes it possible to compare thousands of designs with respect to their entire project information. In many projects, the farmer is not the owner of the installation, but receives a lease from a large utility that sells the electricity. Farmers are concerned about the health and yield of their crops because the primary interest of the utility is to produce as much electricity as possible. Lumi4D serves as an independent tool to ensure that a fair compromise between these opposing stakeholder interests is found. And last but not least, Lumi4D accelerates the permitting process because it readily provides all the necessary statistics and spatial information to prove the project’s compliance with regulatory requirements. ### Q: With the Pre-Seed round opening, where do you want to take the company over the next couple of years? We just finished a demonstrator version of our platform, which is running on a local computer. Next we want to migrate it to the cloud to ensure speed and performance and to make it available to a selected group of interested customers who will serve as beta testers. In parallel, we will run benchmark tests and validate the tool’s accuracy with several test cases. Basically, we want to build a de-risked launch pad for our rocket to take off into space, i.e. a validated, customer-tested, investor-backed, cloud-based demonstrator/POC of the Lumi4D platform. Once we have closed our financing round, we will expand our tech team to complete the final UI/UX development and prepare our platform for market entry in 2028\. We will start with the most AgriPV-ready European countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland), but eventually hope to expand around the globe. It is exciting to look at our financial projections for the coming five years, but I will not get ahead of myself, knowing that it remains a projection for now (albeit based on well-researched and justified assumptions). We have many ideas on how to expand the functionalities of the tool and even for completely new applications of the simulation engine, for example urban planning. But one step at a time. For now, I will already be super happy to onboard our first clients. > Are you a woman leader with an inspiring story? Founded by Women elevates the voices of women making an impact. > Breaking barriers or paving the way for others? We’d love to feature you. Get in touch! 👉 [hi@foundedbywomen.org](mailto:hi@foundedbywomen.org)