Cosmos Innovation, a solar AI tech solutions firm, has raised $19.7 million in Series A funding led by Xora Innovation, an early-stage, deep-tech investment platform of Temasek, a global investment company headquartered in Singapore. The funding will help support the company’s AI-driven approach to developing perovskite silicon tandem solar cell technology.
The round also saw investments from Endeavors, which led the seed round; Two Sigma Ventures; DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis; MIT professor Tomaso Poggio; Richard Socher, natural language processing (NLP) researcher, CEO of You.com and managing partner at AIX Ventures; and Western Technology Investments, a venture debt fund in Silicon Valley.
“Mainstream silicon solar technology is reaching its technological limits. Our innovative AI process optimization platform enables us to accelerate the once-in-a-lifetime platform shift to perovskite silicon tandem technology in the solar industry,” said Vijay Chandrasekhar, CEO and Co-Founder of Cosmos Innovation.
Perovskite silicon tandem has attracted the solar industry’s attention because of its potential to surpass the performance of pure silicon, the industry standard today. However, there are fundamental challenges to overcome to bring this novel design to market. Namely, the multilayer architecture leads to innumerable variations of possible design, making it time-consuming and expensive to achieve the optimal “recipe” for peak cell efficiency and stability.
“Our use of AI-driven experimental design will enable Cosmos Innovation to arrive at the optimal solution with far fewer experiments. This approach will enable us to build highly efficient, cost-effective solar cells in a much shorter time, which is key to meeting the ambitious net zero targets being set around the world,” added Vijay Chandrasekhar.
According to Mercom’s recently released 9M and Q3 2023 Energy Storage and Smart Grid Report, In 9M 2023, VC funding activity rose 4% YoY, with $5.7 billion in 51 deals compared to the $5.5 billion raised in 72 deals in 9M 2022.
Recently, Caelux Corporation, a company developing perovskite-based solar technology to enhance module efficiency, closed a $12 million Series A3 funding round, bringing the total Series A funding raised to $24 Million. The round was led by Temasek, with participation from Reliance New Energy Limited, Khosla Ventures, Mitsui Fudosan, and Fine Structure Ventures.
