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DiggSolar cell manufacturer HelioVolt Corp. has raised $77 million in a second round of private funding. Although CEO B.J. Stanbery has not returned our calls for comment, sources close to the company tell Tech Confidential that HelioVolt recently completed the round and expects a second close later this month.
Paladin Capital Group and the Masdar Clean Tech Fund co-led the round with support from returning investor New Enterprise Associates as well as Solúcar Energias, Morgan Stanley Principal Investments, Sunton United Energy and Yellowstone Capital.
New Enterprise Associates led the company's $8 million Series A round in 2005, and two NEA representatives sit on HelioVolt's board, with Scott Sandell, a general partner, joining last year.
HelioVolt is one of a new generation of startups that use a mix of chemicals called copper indium gallium selendide, or CIGS, to make solar cells. Unlike the standard rigid panels made from silicon, CIGS cells are flexible enough to layer onto windows and other building materials, and they are cheaper to mass produce. On the down side, silicon-based panels are better at converting sunlight into electricity. So far CIGS makers haven't been able to reproduce their lab results at the plant. That hasn't stopped venture capitalists from investing more than $330 million into CIGS firms, including HelioVolt, Nanosolar Inc., Miasole Inc. and SoloPower Inc.
The latest round will allow HelioVolt, which was late to the game in raising funding, to build a manufacturing plant, among other purposes. With Miasole reporting production delays and Nanosolar losing its chief scientist earlier this year, HelioVolt may be the first company to prove that its CIGS cells can be mass produced and still deliver on their promise. —Stacey Higginbotham
See April 4 Tech Confidential special report on cleantech
See May 22 Tech Confidential post
Thanks for cheerleading the need for VCs to invest in alternative fuel startups and businesses. Back when the country ran out of whale oil and people started looking at crude oil in Texas as a possible replacement for energy needs in the home (lighting/heat) I'm sure plenty of VCS missed the boat. I cross-posted on your piece to http://blog.innovators-network.org
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Best wishes for continued success,
Anthony Kuhn
Innovators Network
The transfer of innovations from the lab to manufacturing is a pretty challenging thing to do, so it does make sense that the companies would want to control and produce their technology (solar cells in this case) as long as possible. However, the parallel to the optics industry of the late 90s is a good one. Perhaps the CIGS firms will end up taking a tack from semiconductor startups who realized that it would be impossible to build their own production lines and ended up outsourcing the development of their chips to foundries. The downside is that transferring the knowledge was a longer process when working with a foundry, and as a small customer, sometimes your jobs fell behind when larger firms needed the production space. Plus, there isn’t the equivalent of a solar cell foundry out there at the moment.
The CIGS landscape is becoming frighteningly reminiscent of the optical networking craze of '99/'00. Billions of dollars were invested into optical component start-ups doing tunable lasers, bragg gratings,MEMs-based switches. Anyone remember this? The justification for all the capital was that each of these start-ups felt the compellng urge to build their own production lines because the transfer from lab to production was so critical. By late '01 you could buy a Class 10 clean-room complete on Ebay for $0.04 on the dollar. Anyone want to bet on when the deflation of the CIGS bubble plays out?