Optivolt raises $32 million to build the brain of the solar panels of the future

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Series A led by VXI Capital, backed by the people who built modern solar, including Enphase founding CEO Paul Nahi, former SunPower CEO Tom Werner, and former New York energy czar Richard Kauffman.

After nine years of development, Optivolt’s energy intelligence turns passive solar hardware into adaptive energy systems by managing energy in real time from within the panel.

san francisco — Optivolt, a power electronics company building the intelligence layer for solar energy, yesterday announced a $32 million Series A led by VXI Capital, a new hard tech fund founded by the former chief technology officer of the U.S. Army Defense Innovation Unit, with participation from RA Capital, Valo Ventures and Atlas Innovate. This round brings Optivolt’s total capital raised to date to $42 million.

The solar panel has become a commodity. Optivolt gave him a brain. Its Power Balancer incorporates active power electronics directly into the panel, managing power between cell groups in real time to recover energy that would otherwise be lost due to shade, weather, dirt and uneven degradation. This creates a foundation for adaptable and connected solar systems. With more than 20,000 panels incorporating Power Balancer already shipped, the company will use the new financing to expand manufacturing and bring the technology to solar systems at all scales, from individual homes to utility-scale projects designed to help power AI data centers.

“Solar energy became cheap enough to compete. I founded Optivolt to make it smart enough to power the world,” said Rohit Kalyanpur, founder and CEO of Optivolt. “For nine years, we’ve rebuilt the solar panel from first principles, incorporating aerospace-grade power electronics so it can respond to the Earth as it really is, not the ideal conditions of a laboratory. 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 the energy that conventional solar energy leaves behind. The next step is to put it everywhere.”

“The next era of energy won’t be built by simply installing more of the passive solar panels we already have. It will be built by making solar smart enough to become the backbone of the global energy system,” said Orin Hoffman, CEO of VXI Capital. “Optivolt has spent nine years building the architecture for that future. This financing aims to turn it from a technical breakthrough into the platform on which the next generation of solar will be built.”

“At Enphase, we transform rooftop solar by managing power at the output of each panel. Today, increasing panel power, widespread adoption of storage and the urgent need to reduce costs demand a new approach. Optivolt is incorporating a new class of power electronics within the panel itself to unlock the next leap in performance and economics,” said Paul Nahi, Founding CEO of Enphase and Optivolt Investor. “I helped build the next generation of solar power electronics. At Optivolt we are building the next one.”

Solar, rebuilt from the inside out

Despite decades of progress, the conventional solar panel remains fundamentally passive hardware. Solar panels are rated under controlled laboratory conditions, but operate in a world of shadow, dirt, debris, and uneven degradation. Within a conventional panel, a low-performing cell can limit the output of an entire group of cells, or cause a bypass diode to take that group out of production entirely. Therefore, a localized problem can suppress the output of a much larger section of the panel.

Optivolt redesigned the electrical architecture within the panel around a power electronics brain. Your Power Balancer redistributes power between the panel’s cell groups in real time, fixing the imbalance before it becomes a major loss. It replaces conventional bypass diodes and incorporates rapid shutdown and monitoring in the panel, allowing solar systems to be designed without module-level optimizers, microinverters or separate rapid shutdown devices.

Placing active power electronics inside a solar panel created a fundamental engineering problem: heat. To solve it, Optivolt assembled a team with experience designing power systems for satellites, translating the aerospace discipline (where every watt matters and hardware must survive beyond repair) to a product built to spend decades inside a solar panel. That team developed the Power Balancer, which operates with a conversion efficiency of 99.4 percent under typical conditions.

Optivolt holds 19 issued patents and 27 additional patent applications pending, covering key elements of its panel-integrated power electronics architecture. Optivolt has earned UL certifications covering its integrated junction box, panel-integrated electronics, quick shutdown system, and solar module safety.

In Optivolt’s internal testing, panels incorporating the technology produced up to six times more energy than panels using bolt-on optimizers in defined shading scenarios.

Changing the economics of solar energy

“At SunPower, we spent nearly three decades pushing the limits of how efficiently a solar panel can convert sunlight into electricity. Optivolt is attacking the other half of the problem: how much power that panel actually delivers in the real world once it leaves the factory,” said Tom Werner, former CEO of SunPower and Optivolt investor. “The next big solar panel won’t just produce more power under ideal conditions. It will deliver more power under imperfect conditions in its lifetime.”

“I have spent most of my career making clean energy bankable at scale: creating new financing tools, redesigning markets, and reducing deployment costs,” said Richard Kauffman, former president of New York Energy and Finance and an Optivolt investor. “But finance can only take the industry so far. When the same solar project produces more energy over its lifetime, the economics change everywhere. Optivolt rewrote that equation within the panel itself, dramatically expanding the proportion of global energy demand that solar can economically meet.”

About Optivolt

Optivolt is a power electronics company building the intelligence layer for solar energy. Its on-panel Power Balancer redistributes power between cell groups in real time, helping solar systems deliver more power in real-world conditions while simplifying the hardware around the panel. Optivolt’s long-term goal is to make each solar panel an intelligent, connected node in a global energy network, capable of managing its own performance and coordinating with the system around it. Founded by Thiel Fellow Rohit Kalyanpur, Optivolt is headquartered in San Francisco, CA.

For more information, visit optivolt.com