Swift Solar, a pioneering American solar technology company, has officially raised a sum worth $27 million in what was a Series A financing round. Co-led by Eni Next and Fontinalis Partners, the round saw further participation coming from the likes of new and existing investors including Stanford University, Good Growth Capital, BlueScopeX, HL Ventures, Toba Capital, Sid Sijbrandij, James Fickel, Adam Winkel, Fred Ehrsam, Jonathan Lin, and Climate Capital. According to certain reports, Swift Solar will deploy these newly-acquired funds to transform the solar energy landscape with perovskite tandem solar products that offer far superior performance than traditional alternatives. On a more practical note, this is likely to involve scaling of efficient and stable tandem technology as the company prepares to break ground on its first factory. In case you didn’t keep track, perovskites have become, as of late, the groundbreaking PV technology that our solar industry had been looking for all this time. We get to say so largely because perovskite solar cell production demand much lesser material and lesser energy, which like you can guess, will automatically drive down manufacturing costs and carbon pollution. To be more precise, the performance gains and cost reductions from perovskite technology may as well decrease the cost of solar energy by up to 30%. Put that alongside Swift Solar’s proprietary perovskite tandem technology and you have a shot at drastically outperforming today’s silicon and thin-film technologies at a significantly lower cost.
“Solar is the future of energy—not just clean energy,” said Joel Jean, co-founder and CEO of Swift Solar. “Our advanced perovskite solar cells can outperform anything currently available on the market. People may not realize that solar manufacturing today is concentrated in China and Southeast Asia. Swift Solar will bring advanced solar manufacturing back to the U.S. and strengthen our domestic renewable energy sector. This is an unprecedented opportunity to reshape the global solar industry. With this round, we’re excited to partner with world-class deeptech and strategic investors to take Swift to the next level.”
More on those concrete details would reveal how improvements in efficiency and durability enabled by Swift Solar’s perovskite technology would empower, for instance, the electric vehicle market to gain 15 miles of range or more per day with perovskite solar roofs. Beyond that, satellites also stand to benefit from a 10x cost reduction and improved radiation tolerance for solar arrays. In fact, Swift Solar has already started testing its perovskite technology in space.
Having secured over $44 million in finding till date, Swift Solar has also bagged more than $16 million in federal and state grants from the U.S. Department of Energy, Department of Defense, National Science Foundation, and the California Energy Commission. This it did after becoming, back in 2017, a collective spinout of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
