Molecule’s Entry Into the European ETRM Market
Molecule is an established ETRM system that was started in 2012 as a modern alternative to older, legacy ETRM software. They expanded their market presence into Europe in 2023 and, after gaining their first European customers, chose ROITI as a partner for delivering implementation and ongoing support to those customers.
“We’re really glad to be working with ROITI,” says Sameer Soleja, founder and CEO of Molecule. “ROITI was an instrumental part of our initial expansion into Europe and we very much value our partnership.”
Sameer Soleja, Founder and CEO of Molecule
Soleja has been in the energy software field for over 25 years, having come from a programming background. He started Molecule with a mission to build an ETRM system focused on usability, ease of use, and modern, reliable technology. ROITI’s CEO, Ventsislav Topuzov, speaks with Soleja about the Molecule’s background, system, and plans for further development.
“The Molecule Way”
While he was clear on why he wanted to start Molecule, Soleja didn’t have a sense of exactly how it was different from its competitors in the market at first. “When you start a company, sometimes you wind up being myopic in your view of the world,” Soleja shares. “Over the last couple of years, that has certainly changed. Molecule is dramatically different from nearly every one of the other ETRM vendors on the market. We are born in the cloud, we are tech-focused, design-forward, focused on ease of use, and on supporting everything our customers trade.”
Soleja views this as a major differentiator in the ETRM market as older legacy software lags behind. “If you’ve talked to folks who’ve ever looked under the hood at Molecule, you’ll probably get a universal response that we have the best tech in the ETRM industry,” he adds.
Behind the Technology
Molecule was founded by technologists — so, naturally, their love for tech shows throughout the platform. In addition to being cloud-native and multi-tenant, they’re committed to using the best technology available as the foundation of their platform.
Soleja thinks back to Molecule’s earliest form: “At the time, we chose the things that we wanted to use. Early on, that was MongoDB and Ruby on Rails — MongoDB is not in vogue anymore, and for very, very good reasons,” Soleja laughs.
Now, Soleja shares: “Molecule is built on top of a Ruby on Rails web application which makes for fast and very pleasant development of new screens. We use PostgreSQL as a back-end, it’s a fast and scalable modern database. And then we have a huge number of services written in various languages, largely Ruby and Python.”
Additionally, Molecule uses Kubernetes, Docker containers, and Kafka.
Molecule’s Functionality
Molecule covers almost the full lifecycle of exchange and bilateral trading on more than 50 commodities around the world.
“We offer deal capture, position reporting, valuation reporting, risk reporting, trade management, mark-to-market calculations, we have a curve builder, we have a value-at-risk engine and we can export data to a number of back-office systems,” Soleja shares.
As part of its expansion into Europe, Molecule is preparing to connect to the confirms networks in Europe.
Soleja highlights their array of pre-built integrations that help Molecule’s functionality stand out, including “[more than 30 first-tier integrations to] various exchanges, banks, and downstream systems, etc., and then we use an iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) for another 99 integrations to downstream systems.”
What’s ahead for Molecule
Molecule’s first European customers have already gone live. “They are happy with the system, and they have provided a lot of really great feedback around things that we can add and/or change that will make things easier to use,” Soleja says. “We’ve started to incorporate that. So we’re really working in partnership with our anchor European customers to build out more and more functionality.”
For instance, many of Molecule’s European customers are asking for more coverage in short-term power trading.
“Globally, with help from ROITI… we have gotten feedback on our first and second-gen renewables offerings, which we think are market-leading as well,” says Soleja. “We’re getting ready to launch version 3 of these offerings, which takes in a lot of the feedback we’ve gotten before, and we think it’s going to be stellar.”
In addition, Molecule has started hiring in Europe and plans to continue to do so to meet growing demand and better serve their European customers.
Interviewee: Sameer Soleja
Interviewer: Ventsislav Topuzov
Editor: Hristina Tankovska
