Power electronics firm Optivolt has secured $32 million in Series A fundraising from VXI Capital to build the “intelligence layer” of next-generation solar panels, company officials say.
Founded by CEO Rohit Kalyanpur, Optivolt gives solar panels a brain, the company says. The funding from VXI Capital, a new hard tech fund founded by the former CTO of the Defense Innovation Unit of the U.S. Military and a group of investment partners, brings the Californian firm’s total capital raised to date to $42 million.
The solar panel is now a commodity in 2026. Once valued at up to $3,500 per watt when accounting for inflation, PV modules are now a normal product that some average consumers can buy in stores. Optivolt’s Power Balancer technology lets solar think for itself, according to Kalyanpur.
“Solar became cheap enough to compete. I founded Optivolt to make it intelligent enough to power the world,” he says. “For nine years, we’ve rebuilt the solar panel from first principles, embedding aerospace-grade power electronics so it can respond to Earth as it actually is, not the ideal conditions of a lab.
“The result is the first solar panel system that thinks for itself – one that adapts to shade, weather, dirt and degradation in real time, recovering energy conventional solar leaves behind. The next step is putting it everywhere.”
The Optivolt Power Balancer embeds power electronics into solar panels themselves, allowing the panel to manage energy among cell groups in real time. This allows the solar panels to recover power they would otherwise lose to shade, changing weather conditions, or any other number of mitigating factors.
According to Optivolt officials, more than 20,000 panels incorporating the Power Balancer have already shipped. Rather than research and development, the new financing brings the company’s products to any scale imaginable.
Creating the active solar panel
Solar panels are passive technology, despite decades of progress in energy efficiency, weather protection, and other areas. One underperforming PV cell can potentially hold back the output of an entire group of cells. Optivolt officials say the San Franciscan company aims to put an end to localized issues becoming much larger energy problems.
“The next era of energy will not be built by simply installing more of the same passive solar panels we already have. It will be built by making solar intelligent enough to become the backbone of the global power system,” says Orin Hoffman, managing director at VXI Capital.
“Optivolt has spent nine years building the architecture for that future. This financing is about taking it from a technical breakthrough to the platform on which the next generation of solar is built.”
The concept of putting active power electronics inside a solar panel was sure to generate a lot of heat, creating unique engineering challenges for a product that is also pointing at the sun. In response, the Optivolt team developed the Power Balancer, which it says operates at 99.4% conversion efficiency under “typical conditions.” The team looked to solar construction techniques used in aerospace applications, testing the panel to potentially spend decades inside a solar panel.
The next generation
Optivolt’s internal testing shows that panels that incorporate the Power Balancer technology produce up to six times as much power as those that use bolted-on power optimizers. The company tested the panels against each other in defined shade scenarios.
Enphase CEO Paul Nahi says his company “transformed rooftop solar” through power output management. Now an Optivolt investor himself, the long-time energy executive says the budding firm is the key to solar energy’s next big leap.
“Today, rising panel power, the widespread adoption of storage, and the urgent need to reduce costs demand a new approach. Optivolt is bringing a new class of power electronics inside the panel itself to unlock the next leap in performance and economics,” Nahi says. “I helped build the last generation of solar power electronics. At Optivolt we are building the next.”
Tags: funding, Optivolt, products, PV Modules, utility-scale
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