Cosmos Innovation – an AI-first company building next-generation perovskite silicon tandem (PST) solar cell technology – recently announced $19.7 million in total funding. The funding will support the company’s fundamentally different approach to developing perovskite silicon tandem solar cell technology.
This funding coincides with Cosmos Innovation’s unveiling of Mobius, the industry’s pioneering AI recipe optimization platform. Mobius has been demonstrated across several sectors, including solar, silicon carbide, advanced data center chips, and advanced packaging. And this platform drives Cosmos Innovation’s ambitious endeavor: constructing the world’s first self-learning fab in the solar and semiconductor space.
Cosmos Innovation is transforming the manual trial-and-error-based development process for semiconductors by utilizing AI to optimize and speed up the experimental design, test, and iterate loop. And the company is at the forefront of using AI to build disruptively better physical and science-based technologies. And Cosmos Innovation plans to build the world’s first self-learning fab in this space and expects its approach to yield better performance for perovskite silicon tandem solar cells.
The Series A funding round was led by Xora Innovation, an early-stage and deep-tech investment platform of Temasek. The other investors joining the round include Innovation Endeavors, which led the seed round; Two Sigma Ventures; DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis; MIT professor Tomaso Poggio, a founder of computational neuroscience; Richard Socher, leading natural language processing (NLP) researcher, CEO of You.com and managing partner at AIX Ventures; and Western Technology Investments.
Perovskite silicon tandem has been gaining solar industry attention since it has the 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 many variations of possible design, making it time-consuming and expensive to achieve the optimal recipe for peak cell efficiency and stability. Cosmos Innovation is utilizing Mobius to unlock the full potential of perovskite silicon tandem technology. Cosmos Innovation uses advanced AI to develop the most cost-effective and high-efficiency solar cells.
Cosmos Innovation has been seeing remarkable results from the Mobius platform. And the company has demonstrated a 10x acceleration in process recipe development time and step-function improvements in target performance metrics with leading semiconductor companies. Mobius can discover a variety of materials, processes, and architectures that yield the most efficient solar cells in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of conventional methods.
Founded in 2022, Cosmos Innovation brings together leading AI, semiconductors, and solar experts to give the company a distinct market advantage. Founders Vijay Chandrasekhar and Joel Li (CTO) have academic and professional careers at the intersection of these three fields, each with deep expertise in leading specialized engineering teams at major research institutes.
Before Cosmos Innovation, Chandrasekhar led the AI effort at the Institute for Infocomm Research at the Agency of Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), where he managed a portfolio of more than 50 AI projects across over ten domains with a key focus on semiconductors. And Li was the former group head at the Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore, where he led the development of an award-winning PV manufacturing technology. Plus, he also served as an AI team lead at A*STAR, where he led the development and deployment of AI solutions for Tier-1 manufacturers and R&D institutes in the semiconductor, material and chemical domains.
KEY QUOTES:
“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. 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.”
— Vijay Chandrasekhar, CEO and co-founder, Cosmos Innovation
“Cosmos Innovation has proven AI technology to tackle the combinatorial explosion problem that semiconductor and solar cell process optimization faces. Our proprietary AI system, Mobius, has shown it can accelerate process optimization by up to 10x. It does this by intelligently proposing the next set of materials and process conditions to run. We believe that Mobius will help us solve the last-mile challenges of perovskite silicon tandem solar cells and accelerate its commercialization.”
— Joel Li, CTO and Co-Founder, Cosmos Innovation
“Cosmos Innovation has assembled some of the world’s leading minds in AI, semiconductor manufacturing and solar to create Mobius – the first AI platform that enables self-learning fabrication of complex semiconductor devices. The application of Mobius to perovskite silicon tandem solar cells promises to deliver more cost-effective, reliable and efficient modules on an accelerated timeline. Cosmos Innovation exemplifies the technical and market expertise emerging from the Singapore R&D ecosystem and Xora is excited to support this home-grown, deep-tech company that’s poised to transform the global market for sustainable solar energy.”
— Phil Inagaki, Managing Director, Xora Innovation
“AI is transforming the way science gets done. Cosmos Innovation is at the forefront of AI innovation for the solar and semiconductor industries, driving a radically different approach for process recipe development. Cosmos Innovation is at the confluence of the company’s proven AI capabilities and the massive trillion-dollar opportunity emerging from silicon solar technology reaching its fundamental limits.”
— Dror Berman, Founding Partner, Innovation Endeavors
“The beauty of AI is its ability to positively surprise us – to reach for solutions that elude our human brains because of our biology and conditioning. AI thrives in situations of complexity and large parameter spaces – like semiconductor development. Cosmos Innovation is harnessing these capabilities, and building a tremendous team of experts, with a goal of reaching new heights in perovskite silicon tandem solar cell efficiency. We’re incredibly excited to support them on this valuable mission.”
— Colin Beirne, Partner, Two Sigma Ventures
