Optivolt has raised $32 million in Series A funding to expand manufacturing and deployment of its panel-integrated power electronics technology, bringing the company’s total capital raised to $42 million. VXI Capital led the round, with participation from RA Capital, Valo Ventures, and Atlas Innovate. Optivolt also counts several experienced energy industry executives among its investors, including Enphase founder and former CEO Paul Nahi, former SunPower CEO Tom Werner, and former New York energy official Richard Kauffman.
Founded by Rohit Kalyanpur, Optivolt is developing an intelligence layer for solar panels through its Power Balancer technology. The system embeds active power electronics directly into a solar panel and manages energy among groups of cells in real time.
The technology is designed to reduce energy losses caused by shade, dirt, weather, debris, and uneven panel degradation. In conventional solar panels, an underperforming cell can reduce output across a much larger group of cells or cause a bypass diode to remove that section from production.
Optivolt’s Power Balancer instead redistributes energy among cell groups before localized issues lead to larger losses. The system also incorporates rapid shutdown and monitoring capabilities into the panel, potentially reducing the need for separate module-level optimizers, microinverters, and rapid-shutdown hardware.
More than 20,000 panels incorporating the Power Balancer have already been shipped. Optivolt plans to use the new funding to increase manufacturing and bring its technology to residential, commercial, and utility-scale solar projects, including systems intended to supply power for AI data centers.
Developing electronics that operate inside a solar panel required Optivolt to address the significant thermal challenges associated with panel-integrated power management. The company assembled engineers with experience developing power systems for satellites and applied aerospace design principles to equipment expected to operate for decades without repair.
Under typical conditions, the Power Balancer operates at 99.4% conversion efficiency, according to Optivolt.
The company holds 19 issued patents and has 27 additional patent applications pending covering aspects of its panel-integrated power-electronics architecture. Optivolt has also received UL certifications covering its integrated junction-box enclosure, panel electronics, rapid-shutdown system, and solar-module safety.
In internal testing under defined shading conditions, Optivolt said panels incorporating its technology generated up to six times as much power as panels equipped with external optimizers.
The company sees its technology as part of a broader transition from passive solar equipment to adaptive, connected energy systems that continuously optimize performance based on operating conditions.
KEY QUOTES:
“Solar became cheap enough to compete. I founded Optivolt to make it intelligent enough to power the world. For nine years, we’ve rebuilt the solar panel from first principles, embedding aerospace-grade power electronics so it can respond to Earth as it actually is, not the ideal conditions of a lab. 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 energy conventional solar leaves behind. The next step is putting it everywhere.”
Rohit Kalyanpur, Founder And CEO Of Optivolt
“The next era of energy will not be built by simply installing more of the same passive solar panels we already have. It will be built by making solar intelligent enough to become the backbone of the global power system. Optivolt has spent nine years building the architecture for that future. This financing is about taking it from a technical breakthrough to the platform on which the next generation of solar is built.”
Orin Hoffman, Managing Director At VXI Capital
“At Enphase, we transformed rooftop solar by managing power at the output of each panel. Today, rising panel power, the widespread adoption of storage, and the urgent need to reduce costs demand a new approach. Optivolt is bringing a new class of power electronics inside the panel itself to unlock the next leap in performance and economics. I helped build the last generation of solar power electronics. At Optivolt we are building the next.”
Paul Nahi, Founding CEO Of Enphase And Optivolt Investor
“At SunPower, we spent nearly three decades pushing the limits of how efficiently a solar panel could turn sunlight into electricity. Optivolt is attacking the other half of the problem: how much energy that panel actually delivers in the real world once it leaves the factory. The next great solar panel won’t just produce more power under ideal conditions. It will deliver more energy across the imperfect conditions of its working life.”
Tom Werner, Former CEO Of SunPower And Optivolt Investor
“I’ve spent most of my career making clean energy financeable at scale – building new financing tools, redesigning markets and driving deployment costs down. 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 inside the panel itself, dramatically expanding the share of the world’s energy demand that solar can economically serve.”
Richard Kauffman, Former Chairman Of Energy And Finance For New York And Optivolt Investor
