Mario Kohle was born in 1984 in the GDR and grew up in Strausberg, a town east of Berlin. His grandfather, Horst Kohle, had played for the East German national football team. Few people who see Kohle in a boardroom think of that.
The family name carried one kind of fame. Kohle chose another. He studied business administration at WHU, the Otto Beisheim School of Management, finishing in 2008. As a student he became fascinated by e-commerce. In 2008, with Robin Behlau, he started Käuferportal, a platform that connected homeowners with local tradespeople for building and renovation jobs. It was later renamed Aroundhome. A student became a chief executive before most of his classmates had settled into their first jobs.
A software founder walking into solar roofs, a business of cables, steel and installers.
In 2016 he sold it to ProSiebenSat.1 and General Atlantic, reportedly for €100M. Most founders would have taken a long holiday. Kohle was thinking about something else. He has described a Greta Thunberg moment in 2015, when climate change stopped being an abstract topic for him.
What almost nobody expected was the next move. A software founder walking into solar roofs, a business of cables, steel and installers. With Viktor Wingert and Jochen Ziervogel he founded Enpal in 2017, selling rooftop systems to homeowners on a lease instead of a large purchase. The industry doubted that a startup could do the hard physical part. Early backers such as Lukasz Gadowski and Alexander Samwer bet that it could.
Quality was the weak point. A solar company lives or dies on installation. So in 2021 Enpal opened its own training centre for installers and electricians, a costly choice, and it worked. Revenue went from €56M in 2020 to €115M in 2021 and almost €415M in 2022, the first profitable year. By the end of 2023 the company had put about 60,000 systems on German roofs, and staff numbers had climbed from 324 in 2020 to some 2,500 two years later. SoftBank and Leonardo DiCaprio's fund joined the investor list, and the company passed one billion euros of revenue in 2025.
Kohle has said he does not chase valuations, and the record bears him out. He built a trade school before he built a brand. For first-time founders, there is a tidy lesson: the unglamorous layer under the idea, the people who actually do the work, is often where the moat sits.