Optivolt Raises $32M Series A to Build the Brain for Solar Panels

Optivolt (Techstars 2018) has raised a $32M Series A, bringing the company's total funding to $42M.

Optivolt builds power electronics that live inside the solar panel itself. Its core technology, the Power Balancer, helps panels produce more energy in the messy conditions they face every day, from shade and dirt to weather and uneven wear over time. The new funding will expand manufacturing and bring the technology to residential, commercial, and utility-scale projects, including installations built to power AI data centers.

Momentum Behind the Round

More than 20,000 solar panels with the Power Balancer have already shipped. Optivolt holds 19 issued patents with 27 more pending, and has earned UL certifications covering its junction box enclosure, panel-integrated electronics, rapid-shutdown system, and module safety.

The Problem With Today's Solar Panels

Solar has become one of the cheapest sources of new power. Still, a typical panel loses a meaningful share of its output whenever part of it is shaded, dirty, or wearing unevenly. Conventional panels rely on bypass diodes to route around underperforming cells, which protects the panel but leaves energy on the table. Many installers add separate optimizers or microinverters to recover some of that loss, adding hardware and cost to every system.

How the Power Balancer Works

The Power Balancer redistributes energy among groups of cells within a panel in real time. When one section is struggling, the system rebalances so the rest of the panel keeps producing. It replaces conventional bypass diodes and builds rapid shutdown and monitoring directly into the panel. Depending on the system design, that can reduce or remove the need for separate optimizers, microinverters, and rapid-shutdown devices.

Optivolt reports that the Power Balancer runs at 99.4% conversion efficiency under typical operating conditions. In the company's internal testing under defined shading scenarios, panels with its technology produced up to six times the power of panels using bolted-on optimizers.

What's Next

With the Series A closed, Optivolt will scale up production and speed deployment across residential, commercial, and utility-scale solar. Data centers are a growing focus, as demand for power from AI workloads continues to climb.

The People Building It

Optivolt was founded by Rohit Kalyanpur, a Thiel Fellow who has spent nine years rebuilding the solar panel from first principles.

"Solar became cheap enough to compete. I founded Optivolt to make it intelligent enough to power the world," said Rohit Kalyanpur, founder and CEO of Optivolt. "The result is the first solar panel system that thinks for itself... The next step is putting it everywhere."

To learn more, visit optivolt.com.