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Interview with Molecule's Sameer Soleja - CTRMRadio
In this episode of CTRMRadio, Molecule Founder and CEO Sameer Soleja talks about Molecule’s focus on the North American and European power markets. Hear how Molecule is built for complexity and helping trading firms prepare for what’s next in power and renewables.
June 16th, 2025 | 17:17
Summary KeywordsMolecule ETRM, Sameer Soleja interview, energy trading software, power trading systems, renewable energy trading, FTR support in ETRM, REC management, AI in energy trading, modern ETRM solutions, North American power markets, European power trading, risk management software, energy market automation, CTRM software trends, digital transformation in energy.
Transcript
Kevin MossopAffiliate Analyst, CTRM Center
Sameer SolejaFounder & CEO, Molecule
Kevin Mossop Welcome to another edition of CTRM Radio, an ad hoc podcast by Commodity Technology Advisory, hosted on ctrmcenter.com and ettcenter.net. Your place for everything related to CTRM and commodity management software, as well as the energy transition. My name is Kevin Mossop, an affiliate advisor with ComTech Advisory.
On today's podcast, I'll be speaking with Mr. Sameer Soleja, the founder, president, and CEO of Molecule. Our discussion topics will include Molecule's focus on the North American and European power markets, along with insight into Molecule's product roadmap. I'd like to welcome Mr. Sameer Soleja, who's the founder and president of and CEO of Molecule. Thanks for taking time to speak with me today, Sameer.
Sameer Soleja Always pleasure, Kevin.
Kevin Mossop So we talked this time last year and covered numerous topics. I remember that power and renewables were a key focus for Molecule. And today's podcast will be discussing some of the progress and the accomplishments Molecule has made with their continued focus on power and renewables, as well as Molecule's future initiatives in these areas. I'd like to start with Elektra, which is Molecule's module for managing physical and financial power. Can you explain some of the key capabilities Molecule has enhanced within Elektra, and how Elektra is being utilized by customers in the North American and European power markets?
Sameer Soleja Yeah, totally. So a lot of what we focused on with regards to Elektra in the last year has been acknowledging the extremely high volume trading that we see our customers doing. We serve a number of IPPs and REPs in North America, well, in the Americas, and in Europe. And it seems that more and more long-term, high resolution instruments are what we're seeing people trade, for example, PPAs and FTRs. So, you know, an FTR could be traded for a few months or a year, and it settles hourly and usually people receive thousands of them at a time. And so what we found is that we were one of the few vendors actually willing to ingest that data and process it per hour as the deal life cycle went on but that required some upgrades internally to be able to do that at scale for a lot of customers. So, so a lot of what we did was that, and a lot of what we did was around automated configuration for management of new paths and things like that so that we're able to ingest at scale and at high quality.
One of the asks that we've had from a lot of customers is to be able to mark FTRs against a curve that uses a methodology that the customer wants. And we spent the year sort of triangulating what the mainstream market ask was for that. And this summer we plan to release a curve build for FTRs so that we have an industry standard approach to help mark FTRs to market.
Kevin Mossop Interesting. Yeah, definitely the, those long term agreements, either hourly or 15 minute granularity pose some significant system challenges. You know, you know, customers are not trading a dozen of those, like you say, they're trading hundreds or thousands of those, right? And a 15 minute granularity it's a massive amount of data.
Sameer Soleja Yes, absolutely is.
Kevin Mossop Managing renewable certificates is complex, not only because of the variety of products, but the ongoing changes in those rules and regulations, as well as the lack of standardization across those markets. Molecule's developed a module called Hive for managing lifecycle of renewable certificates and obligations that include support for both European and North American markets.
Can you describe some of the key features of Hive and how you've managed to solve some of the complexities of managing the variation in those products across the markets?
Sameer Soleja Yeah, sure. So, what we've found is that most of our customers are on sort of a bridge between our Elektra and Hive feature sets.
Like they need both. A lot of the folks who are trading certificates, especially in power, are trading RECs or GOs or something similar and often along alongside term PPAs. And so, Hive, and Elektra combined to allow customers to be able to manage those more easily. So things like as generated PPAs as opposed to simply fixed volume PPAs where a customer might have sold shape or 80% of the output of a facility, or even 80% of the output of one turbine on a facility to somebody. And and then forecast what 80% of the output means, and then update that daily every day for ever. Another bit is where they might be selling power and certificates on a PPA where the power itself, or where the PPA itself is multiple decades long, but settles hourly for, you know, 30, 40 years.
That sort of thing creates an enormous amount of data in the native, Molecule structure. I think we had estimated one trade would take half a billion rows, and so we had to definitely build some optimizations around that to make, to make that faster and easier to process. The other big thing is that we rolled out what we think is an industry-first feature on connecting certificates to obligations both in draft mode and in final mode, where basically we are able to model a company's obligations, whether they come from trades or from a native position of some sort that we call an asset. And then we can connect to registries and download the certificates that they have as well, or the positions, essentially, that they've had transferred to them, and then run an optimizer with a customized algorithm to allocate those certificates to their obligations in the way that makes most sense as a company.
What we found is that a lot of people are delivering certificates just as sort of a matter of course, as a matter of business, but the best are optimizing which certificates to deliver against which obligations, either to maximize market price or get rid of expiring certificates first, or something like that. And this algo allows 'em to do that at scale.
Kevin Mossop That's interesting. That's definitely a complex piece, you know, and the rules change over time.
Sameer Soleja Yeah.
Kevin Mossop It's not like, get it right once. Those rules are constantly changing, where those certificates apply, changes as they age, et cetera. And it changes market to market, you know, state by state, country by country. So,
Sameer Soleja It really does. It's a fascinating market.
Kevin Mossop Hard to keep up. For the North American market, I know you've added trading support for financial hedging of congestion costs with the ISOs and RTOs with products such as FTRs and TCRs, as you mentioned. The intricacies of those financial hedging instruments vary from market to market.
How did you design a comprehensive solution to accommodate all those variations and how those instruments are traded across the various North American markets?
Sameer Soleja Yeah, so I think that's one of the places where Molecule really shines because of an early engineering decision we made. So, in Molecule unlike most other systems, there is one primary master data object called a product that has all the attributes of trades that would be booked against it. Like basically the trade only needs to add counterparty quantity at price.
And so the product model is really flexible, and we found it was very easy to extend it to model congestion trading to model virtuals to model things at any location, anywhere just by virtue of its design. And then when we make a change, we make a generically accept, generically applicable to the whole product model such that we can, for example take something we might have built for spot certificates, or I think it was actually spot crypto, and then use it for certificate delivery and enhance it from there. So, the great result out of that is that when we make a change, everybody gets the benefit.
Kevin Mossop No, it sounds like a solid approach. The complexity is sort of never ending with some instruments in some of these markets.
Sameer Soleja Yeah, that's right.
Kevin Mossop Given Molecule's focus on power in Europe and North America, I'm interested to understand, from your perspective, where you see similarities but also differences in the requirements from some of the European and North American power customers and how you've designed the Molecule software to accommodate those regional differences, which are often surprisingly significant.
Sameer Soleja They really are. Fortunately, just by virtue of where we live we started with the harder part first. Like for, from what we can tell in general, American power is like, yeah, multiple times as hard in terms of intricacy as European power. You gotta deal with the multiple ISOs. You gotta deal with their rules, a bunch of different time zones, all these different sorts of instruments. And not to mention where you might have 30 RTOs with 30 trading locations In Europe, you've got 14,000 in Texas alone. So, we started with something harder and we're finding that going to something more regulated and structured is actually an easier approach for us. That said, there are differences in how cross border trading works and probably most significantly differences in how companies are needing to deal with multiple currencies, which just isn't a thing.
Kevin Mossop Yeah the lack of standardization certainly across the North American power markets has always surprised me. And I think I agree with you from the European side, it's a little more standardized, but you still do have some regional differences country to country. In addition to your dedicated focus to the power markets, I know you've been investing in the application's user interface.
Can you elaborate on some of the improvements and capabilities that you've added to the Molecule user interface?
Sameer Soleja Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, we've always felt that our UI and UX was one of our strongest points in our application. I mean, that's what we were founded on. And we realized a couple years ago that it had gotten complex enough under the hood that it was time for a rewrite.
And so we did, we started a rewrite about a year and a half to two years ago, and we are almost done, we've been rolling it out gradually screen by screen to our existing customers so they can use sort of both sides of the app, what we call the Mirage side, which is the new one, and the self-facing Vapor side, which is the old one.
And, some of the really cool things that Mirage is giving our customers are things like multi-language support, where we can quickly add support for new language. Today we support English and Spanish and I think maybe German and are able to roll out new languages very quickly. Multi-day format support, multi number format support, light and dark mode, easy mobile access, and most importantly, a faster built and consistent user interface across the entire application with things like filtering and sorting, tables and things like that work exactly the same everywhere you see them. So really it's just a way to allow the product to scale in a way that helps customers around the world use the software in an easier way. Most of it's out already, and the last piece, it should be at the end of the third quarter.
Kevin Mossop It sounds like some important features. I mean, we're seeing things change at a, at an increasing pace these days, and users are starting to expect that level of flexibility and then the tools they work with. So it sounds like a sound investment you guys have made there.
Sameer Soleja We'll be glad to be done with it.
Kevin Mossop You're never done, Sameer. If you got — some new ideas will come out there. So, I'd like to switch to AI for a minute. There's a lot of interest and attention focused on how to utilize AI to enhance solutions in the ETRM/CTRM space. Can you describe how Molecule is leveraging AI, and how your customers will benefit from some of the product features that you'll utilize AI in the future?
Sameer Soleja Yeah, sure. And a lot of this is based on the sort of same incremental engineering approach that I, I described before. So, our really strong API which is basically a hundred percent coverage of the whole app, had to exist so that our new UI would live on top of it. But it also serves the purpose of providing, you know, sort of infinite querying capabilities and data integration capabilities to our customers.
Our first AI offering, Mo, was a chat bot that allows non-technical users to use our API for really complex queries. And Mo speaks multiple languages, at least three I think at this point. So that's really exciting. You can ask Mo like, you know, give me my last thousand trades with this particular counterparty this year.
He'll give you the API query and the answer within seconds. So that's really great. From there though, we're definitely exploring agentic offerings and I just saw one of our very early one of our very early next generation prototypes of LLM integration and you know, we have some really cool things cooking that I can't wait to show you.
Kevin Mossop No, it sounds exciting. Sounds like you're making good progress on that front. With Molecule's ongoing focus on the power and renewables markets, when you look ahead, what do you see as the upcoming customer needs, and what objectives have you set for the Molecule team for the North American and European power markets specifically?
Sameer Soleja Yeah, so a couple of big things. Deeper integration with the ability to schedule power in both markets. You know, as you know, we have a partnership with power optics here in the US and we're looking to have a similar partnership in Europe. If we can find the right fit. We also are, I mean, I think a lot of what we're focused on is making sure we cover every instrument that somebody might trade, and also making it scalable, easier, and easier to, for them, to onboard a new portfolio. So, you know, in general, our focus is scale and the ability to make things easier for our customers, the ability to take things that they have to do by hand and make them automated, and then, you know, by, as a reaction or a reflection of that, also make things easier for ourselves.
Kevin Mossop Yeah, make it easier for yourself, make it easier for the customer. That's always the challenge, right? One or the other, or both, if you can do it.
Sameer Soleja Both if you can.
Kevin Mossop Sameer, I'd like to thank you for providing your insights to the European and North American power markets. Molecule has made significant progress in enhancing its offering for these markets and you've laid out an aggressive roadmap. I look forward to checking in with you in the future and progress updates on your strategic initiatives.
Thanks for taking the time to speak with me today.
Sameer Soleja Really glad to be here and as always, amazing to talk to you Kevin.
Kevin Mossop All right. Thanks, Sameer. Take care.
Sameer Soleja Take care.