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February has been a good month for Advanced Renewable Energy Company LLC. The new cleantech venture in Nashua, N.H., launched by GT Solar co-founder Kedar Gupta got a visit from President Barack Obama, and brought in a $5 million check from General Catalyst Partners, a Cambridge venture capital firm.
Advanced Renewable, which goes by the name ARC Energy, has developed an improved process for manufacturing the sapphire crystals used in light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs and displays. Co-founder and CTO Richard Schwerdtfeger said with about a dozen employees, ARC already has revenue in the tens of millions from a handful of customers. It plans to grow its head count to between 35 and 50 employees in the next two years, Schwerdtfeger said.
Obama toured ARC before a town hall meeting to promote his plan to make available $30 billion for lending to small businesses, funded through repaid bailout loans from the U.S. government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bailout of financial institutions.
The company makes a turnkey system that allows manufacturers to grow sapphire crystals on six-inch and eight-inch disks, as opposed to the industry-standard two-inch disks currently in use. Schwerdtfeger said the improvement is necessary to make LED’s competitive with other energy-efficient light bulb technologies.
“For the industry to really become more cost-effective and really compete, they need to be on a semiconductor scale – six-inch diameters,” he said. The savings comes from a reduction in processing steps required to produce the maximum number of LED’s from a single wafer. “All the downstream steps become more efficient,” he said.
ARC has a $5 million tranche of a planned $10 million Series A round from General Catalyst, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and posted today. Schwerdtfeger said the venture has been bootstrapped to date, mostly by Gupta himself. General Catalyst managing director Hemant Taneja will take a seat on ARC’s board.
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