Austin’s SolarBridge Technologies aims to raise up to $15 million in venture capital
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PDFAustin American-Statesman (April 29, 2011) - Austin’s SolarBridge Technologies Inc. has begun work on raising a third investment round to support volume production and expanded sales and engineering development for its advanced power inverters, which go into solar power panels installed on the rooftops of homes and small businesses.
CEO Ron Van Dell said the 50-employee company needs to raise money as it shifts into production, expanded sales and expanded development on follow-up products.
“We are working on another round of about $10 million to $15 million,” Van Dell said.
The company, founded in 2004 in Champaign, Ill., has previously raised $27 million in two venture rounds, including a $15 million round led last year by Rho Ventures.
Before that round, SolarBridge also won a $1.5 million grant from the Texas Enterprise Fund. The company moved to Austin in early 2009 shortly after Van Dell became CEO.
The company has developed microinverter devices that convert the direct electrical power produced by a solar panel into alternating current, which can be used by a house or business or transferred to the utility power grid.
The company, which licenses technical discoveries made at the University of Illinois, uses advanced power electronics design to create an inverter that will work for 25 years or longer and “harvest” more than 95 percent of the energy produced by solar panels.
The result, Van Dell said, is a product that improves efficiency, reliability and safety, while saving on the costs for installation of solar systems, because its products are pre-installed on solar panels. The company estimates its inverters will help lower the cost of energy by 20 percent to 30 percent when compared with systems equipped with conventional power converters.
The company has announced agreements with two major panel makers, Kyocera Solar Inc. and SunPower Corp., and it expects to announce more partners soon. The first panels with its inverters installed should be available for sale this summer.
“Our business model depends on partnering with the heavyweights of the solar power industry, and we have other partners we will be announcing soon,” Van Dell said.
The CEO said his company operates in a segment of the solar market that accounts for about $3 billion in global sales a year. Much of the industry’s focus over the past several years has been on making panels more cheaply and efficiently. But now attention is shifting to power inverters, which can be another center for reduced cost and improved reliability. The company announced the completion of its first-generation products last fall, and it said in March that its first products had passed all tests to meet the Underwriters Laboratory safety standard for such products.
Volume manufacturing by Celestica, a global contract producer, started this month at its factory in Dongguan, China.
The company is testing its second-generation product, to be introduced next year, in its lab.
“We are the new company in the inverter business,” Van Dell said. “We have game-changing technology, and it is attracting top-tier players in the industry. All we have to do is execute.”