Michael Kuntz

Michael Kuntz is a co-founder and Co-CEO of Simusolar, Inc., a company he started in 2014 with Marianne Walpert to bring financed, solar-powered "productive equipment" — solar water pumps for irrigation, agricultural processing machines, and solar fishing lights — to rural farmers and fishers in Tanzania and Uganda. He serves as the company's capital and finance lead, and the venture's core idea grew directly from his conviction that financing is what unlocks technology adoption at the base of the economic pyramid. As he has put it, "We started with the vision of using solar renewably powered tools to transform the rural economy and rural quality of life. And finance was a key part of that."

Kuntz is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and holds an MBA from the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. He describes roughly a decade of emerging-markets experience and more than twelve years in financial operations, having led or supported social ventures across Peru, Nigeria, and Tanzania. His career spans traditional finance and impact work: earlier roles include a position at Raymond James Financial and a financial-analyst role at the nonprofit micro-lender Kiva. Before Simusolar, he served as Board Member, Chief Operating Officer, and President at Generation Enterprise, an organization focused on skills development and livelihoods for urban youth in Nigeria.

At Simusolar he built the company's pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) financing model, which lets customers make incremental mobile-phone payments on equipment rather than buying it outright — extending credit to rural customers who are typically excluded from formal lending. The company is notable for its gender-diverse leadership (roughly half of its leadership team, including Co-Founder Marianne Walpert, are women) and has been supported by accelerators and impact organizations including Power Africa, Rippleworks, and the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship.

Beyond his operating role, Kuntz appears in several startup/investor databases (PitchBook, Wellfound, Foundersuite, Raizer) as an angel investor active at the seed stage — consistent with the "Angel Investor / Seed Round" framing in the source data. Aggregators associate his name with a small number of early-stage angel deals, though these should be treated as unverified given how common his name is (a separate "Michael Kuntz, CFA" is a fractional CFO at FocusCFO).

• Operates at the seed / early stage, where his own company Simusolar has raised money — a natural vantage point for angel-style checks into other early ventures.
• Deep conviction that access to finance — not just technology — is the lever for impact: PAYGO/asset financing to reach customers excluded from traditional credit.
• Strong tilt toward climate/solar, agriculture, and emerging-market livelihoods, reflecting his operating focus in Sub-Saharan Africa.
• Values innovation paired with diversity, particularly gender diversity, in teams: "If you want to be a business that is really innovative… you need a really cooperative environment and a diverse staff, especially a gender diverse staff."
• Aggregator-listed personal angel interests (per PitchBook/Wellfound) span consumer/food products, restaurants, and software — e.g., companies such as Remi, Farmhouse Culture, and Clean Plate Restaurants — though the attribution to this specific Michael Kuntz is not independently confirmed.