Founding NEXA Horizons GmbH: How a US Apartment Share Became a Climate Financing Platform

On 4 May 2026, NEXA Horizons GmbH was officially incorporated. Four founders, headquartered in Bad Marienberg, Rhineland-Palatinate, with one clear mission: bring the green transformation of the German Mittelstand into reality through smart business models and smart financing. Not a solar installer, not a monitoring SaaS — a Climate Financing platform that orchestrates origination, capital structure, and operations in one stack.

Who founded NEXA Horizons

NEXA Horizons has four founders with complementary roles:

• Mudabbir "Mudi" Khawaja — CEO, responsible for strategy and origination
• Laurin Krämer — CTO, responsible for platform and technology (based in Switzerland)
• Rafael Stauber — CCO (Chief Commercial Officer), responsible for sales and key accounts
• Kyra-Marie Kado — CIO (Chief Investment Officer), responsible for capital structure, investments, and governance

The story begins in the United States. Kyra-Marie and Mudi were apartment mates during their studies. During their Master's at Hult International Business School — with stops in Boston and San Francisco — Laurin joined. Three people who realized early on that they wanted to work together as entrepreneurs.

Why solar experience turned into a Climate Financing platform

Back in Germany, Kyra-Marie and Mudi first founded a company in the solar space — classic, project-driven, B2B Mittelstand. While the first projects were being delivered, a first software prototype for origination and project steering was developed in parallel.

Rafael was a customer first. A mid-market business owner who noticed that the team tackled problems others ignored — financing structure, operations, reporting. The customer relationship turned into trust, the trust into partnership. With Laurin as the technical lead and Rafael on the commercial side, the line-up was complete. The chemistry was output-first from day one.

The founding team made a decision: the real bottleneck in the market is not module installation. It is the orchestration of the entire stack — origination, engineering, financing, operations. That is the core of NEXA Horizons.

What Climate Financing means for the Mittelstand

Climate Financing is a structured financing approach that finances decentralized energy infrastructure — photovoltaics and battery storage — through standardized SPV structures and capital stacks, rather than treating them as one-off projects.

According to NEXA's internal estimates, more than 100 GW of potential lies dormant on roofs and surfaces in the German Mittelstand today. The reasons are rarely technical. They are structural:

• Mid-market tickets (200 kWp to 5 MWp) are too small for institutional capital
• Classical bank financing is too expensive and too slow
• No single actor covers the full stack — EPC, financing, operations
• Reporting standards are missing, which makes secondary transactions harder

NEXA Horizons positions itself precisely in this gap.

NEXA's three contract models

NEXA offers three models that build on each other:

1. NEXA Own — The customer owns the asset. NEXA steers delivery with vetted EPC partners and structures the financing (bank, subsidies, equity).
2. NEXA Zero — Zero-CAPEX contracting. An SPV carries the investment and vetted partners build and operate the system on the customer's roof, and the customer pays a fixed energy price (PPA). No investment, no balance-sheet impact.
3. NEXA Lease — A fixed monthly rate over the term, with ownership transferring at the end. Financed through bank and leasing partners; balance-sheet treatment depends on the reporting standard.

Above all three sits NEXA ONE, the operating layer for operations, SLA, SPV administration and portfolio reporting. NEXA ONE is not a contract model; it is the platform all three run on.

These three models cover practically every Mittelstand case — from the owner-run industrial business that wants to maximize self-consumption, to the real-estate holding that wants to avoid balance-sheet impact.

The NEXA vision in one sentence

NEXA Horizons is the platform that brings capital, technology, and the Mittelstand together, so that what ends up on the table is a project that works — bankable, operable, scalable.

Talk to us

If you want to be part of it — as a partner, investor, engineering office, or Mittelstand client — write to us.