Optivolt, which builds electronics to make solar panels more productive, secured $32 million in Series A funding to expand manufacturing. VXI Capital led the round, joined by RA Capital, Valo Ventures and Atlas Innovate, with former SunPower CEO Tom Werner and former Enphase Energy CEO Paul Nahi also investing.
The company embeds its device inside a panel to coordinate how individual cells produce energy, recapturing power that would otherwise be lost to shade, dirt or uneven aging. According to founder and CEO Rohit Kalyanpur, Optivolt has already delivered over 20,000 panels equipped with the electronics, and he added that the hardware can raise a panel's output to as much as six times that of a traditional setup.
Even so, solar remains one of the fastest to build and cheapest sources of new capacity, and US demand should stay solid as utilities and corporations race to secure power for energy-intensive data centers and newly built factories.
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If Optivolt's hardware consistently turns lost watts into usable output, it aligns with a market facing cost pressure yet still growing fast. More electricity from the same panels is the kind of efficiency gain that can attract capital across the solar value chain.
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