In 2015 the McConnell family had a battery humming in the house, one of the first in New South Wales. Katherine McConnell's children, then small, learned that a battery runs down overnight if you use too much. It was a lesson in limits, taught in her own home.
That year she was 39, and a senior manager at Macquarie Bank, running energy leasing. It was a safe, senior job. She walked out of it to start Brighte on her own.
At Macquarie she had worked on a way to make solar financing reach more people.
To understand why, go back to where she began. McConnell was born in Sydney and grew up in the outer western suburbs. Her father had come to Australia as a refugee in his teens, with a Russian and Ukrainian family background behind him. Money, in that house, was never a given. Years later she would say a line that sounds like a family creed: energy equipment should be accessible to everyone.
At Macquarie she had worked on a way to make solar financing reach more people. Inside a big bank it stayed a product. Outside, she believed, it could be a company. What almost nobody noticed at the time was how personal the bet was. Her own family had put solar on the roof in 2010 and a battery in 2015, so she knew what a household feels when it signs up for this technology, and what it fears.
The early money was the hard part. A lender needs two kinds of cash: equity to build the business and debt to lend out. Her seed round closed in 2016. In 2017 Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes' fund, Grok Ventures, led a A$4m round, and Grok has since backed every raise. In 2018 came an A$18.5m Series B and a A$20m debt line from NAB. She has talked about the waiting involved, the long months before an investor says yes.
Then the market shifted under her. Solar loans were not enough, so around 2020 and 2021 Brighte widened into home improvement, backed by a A$100m round in which Grok put in A$78.8m.
By December 2024 the company had raised about A$150m in equity and almost A$1bn in debt, and financed roughly 180,000 solar installations. She is still the only founder, still CEO, and now running neighbourhood electrification pilots in Wollongong.
The lesson she lives is plain. She did not invent a technology. She noticed a household's problem in her own kitchen, then stayed long enough to be believed.