Monday, December 10, 2007

Solar firm Stellaris has slim cells, hefty $6M Series A round

By Efrain Viscarolasaga

Thin-film photovoltaics startup Stellaris Corp. of Lowell has landed $6 million in its first round of funding.

The round was provided by Norwegian firms Convexa Capital and iEnergies AS, according to documents from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Tom Ward, vice president of marketing for Stellaris, confirmed the funding but declined to provide details, saying the company wishes to remain in stealth mode while it continues to develop its product.

Stellaris, which is developing a photovoltaic material that is transparent and uses lenses to amplify sunlight, won first place in MIT's Ignite Clean Energy Business Presentation contest in 2006.

The company was founded by CEO Jim Paull and COO Lee Johnson in 2006. The original idea for the material hails back to Johnson's work with the Northeast Solar Energy Center, a government-funded research center adjacent to MIT during the 1970s.

Stellaris joins Lowell's Konarka Technologies Inc. and Sudbury's Vanguard Solar Inc. in the local thin-film photovoltaics market. Vanguard, a startup launched earlier this year, is in the midst of a search for funding. Konarka has generated a lot of buzz of late with its $45 million round of funding in October, but has not yet made its product commercially available. Executives have pointed to the second half of 2008 for a product release.

Thin-film photovoltaics hold tremendous promise for a number of applications, from lightweight military hardware to residential construction, according to analysts. In a report released this summer, Virginia-based NanoMarkets LLC projected a $7.2 billion market by 2015, up from about $1 billion in 2007. Consumer electronics and residential materials are expected to be the fastest-growing applications.

The company isn't divulging new customers, but Stellaris was able to secure a $200,000 deployment of the technology with Vermont clothing retailer Farm-Way Inc. in 2006.