CPV Semi Startup Solar Junction Gets More Funding

A $13.3M inside round keeps the firm going while they wait for the CPV market to emerge.

Eric Wesoff March 17, 2010

Eric Wesoff

Editor-at-Large
Greentech Media

Eric Wesoff is Editor-at-Large at Greentech Media. Prior to joining GTM, Eric Wesoff founded Sage Marketing Partners in 2000 to provide sales and marketing-consulting services to venture-capital firms and their portfolio companies in the alternative energy and telecommunications sectors. Mr. Wesoff has become a well-known, respected authority and speaker in these fields.

His expertise covers solar power, fuel cells, biofuels and advanced batteries. His strengths are in market research and analysis, business development and due diligence for investors. He frequently consults for energy startups and Silicon Valley's premier venture capitalists.

It's quiet in the world of Concentrating Photovoltaics (CPV).

While c-Si and CSP are furiously running the race, CPV is still at the starting line.

What little news there has been in CPV has been less than dramatic. There was December's Concentrix acquisition. And what amounts to a big CPV deployment by Concentrix -- 1 megawatt in New Mexico, which we covered here -- as well as some other minor personnel developments.

There hasn't been a lot of news out of ostensible market leaders SolFocus or Energy Innovations. We've heard a few rumors of an Amonix funding and of some progress at rooftop CPV player Soliant.

But today, San Jose, California-based Solar Junction announced their next funding round.

Following a recent $3M funding award from NREL as part of DOE's Photovoltaic Incubator Program, Solar Junction just revealed their $13.3 million C round from existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Advanced Technology Ventures and New Enterprise Associates "to support the development of early stage solar energy technologies and help them advance to full commercial scale," as per the DOE website. Solar Junction is developing a manufacturing process to produce a very high efficiency multi-junction cell.

Solar Junction will use these funds to reach higher efficiencies for multi-junction solar cells and to move forward with customer sampling activities, according to their press release.

Solar Junction needs vendors like Solfocus to deploy tens of megawatts of CPV systems and to design-in the Solar Junction product. Both of those things have to happen for Solar Junction to stand a chance of succeeding.

The startup's competitors include incumbent triple-junction solar cell providers Emcore and Spectrolab and startups Cyrium and QuantaSol.

According to Greentech Media's recent report on CPV (CPV: New Applications and Emerging Markets), "With relatively high costs, CPV is even more dependent than other solar technologies upon government subsidies and R&D funds. This creates a certain level of policy risk, which refers to the governmental will to support innovative solar technologies and the uncertainty that the market could disappear when governmental funding stops."