The company, which was formed in 2013 in New York through the combination of a leading distributor of small turbines and a digital site-assessment business, has raised about $40 million in project financing — including $13.5 million announced in October from the NY Green Bank, a state-sponsored investment fund, and U.S. Bank — and signed about 125 leases. Executives said they were in talks for a significantly larger investment that would allow United Wind to develop about 1,000 more projects in the Midwest.

“The small-wind market was small — it hadn’t really taken off the way solar had,” said Russell Tencer, the chief executive, who founded the site-assessment company, Wind Analytics, in 2009. “What we realized was that with that intelligence and software we could offer that same type of one-stop-shop solution that solar has packaged to finance solar.”

Distributors have sold small and medium-size wind turbines for the last three decades. Their spread has been slow, although there are signs that may be changing. According to a report this year from Navigant Research, worldwide revenue from the turbines — defined as anything under 500 kilowatts — will grow to nearly $2.4 billion in 2023 from $1 billion in 2015, in part spurred by the development of the lease model. Still, the United States is expected to remain far behind leaders like Britain, China and Italy, with only $216 million in revenue by 2023.

Over the decades, the American market has waxed and waned, said Jennifer Jenkins, executive director of the Distributed Wind Energy Association, a trade group that focuses on wind energy that is generated and used on site. But the market has grown from something originally aimed at remote, off-grid and island communities to something that the group hopes can reach 30 gigawatts worth of installations by 2030, up from 906 megawatts, reflecting 74,000 turbines installed across the 50 states by the end of 2014, according to the Department of Energy.