News

17 March 2010

 

CPV firm Solar Junction raises $13.3m in Series C funding

Solar Junction Corp of San Jose, CA, USA has raised $13.3m in a Series C round of funding from existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Advanced Technology Ventures and New Enterprise Associates, reports Greentech Media.

This follows $3m in funding in late January from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) as part of the Department of Energy’s Photovoltaic (PV) Incubator Program, which aims to “support the development of early-stage solar energy technologies and help them advance to full commercial scale”. 

Solar Junction is developing a manufacturing process to produce a very high-efficiency multi-junction cell, for use by concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) manufacturers to produce lower-cost CPV systems.

The firm’s management team includes co-founders Jim Weldon as CEO (formerly VP of business development & technology at semiconductor process & metrology equipment firm Veeco Instruments Inc), Dr Homan Yuen as VP R&D (who has experience of materials deposition and characterization for applications including solar cells, optoelectronics, silicon photonics and CMOS electronics), Dr Vijit Sabnis as VP Technology (who has over 15 years of experience with III-V optoelectronic device design, wafer processing, and characterization), and Dr Michael Wiemer as VP Device Development (who has over 12 years of device design & fabrication experience) — the latter three all with PhDs from Stanford University. They are joined by Dr Richard Chicotka as VP engineering (who has over 40 years of experience in engineering and operations management, and is a 30 year veteran of IBM) and Dr John A. Herb as VP business development (who has over 25 years of experience managing the development and commercialization of high-tech products, most recently as VP of Advanced Technology for CPV firm GreenVolts).

Solar Junction says that it aims to use the latest funds to achieve higher efficiencies for multi-junction solar cells and to move forward with customer sampling.

See related item:

DOE provides $12m for four early-stage PV firms

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