Solar startup Cosmos Innovation raises a US$16.8 million Series A round
Daphne Yow
SOLAR cell technology startup Cosmos Innovation has raised US$16.8 million in a Series A funding, it said on Friday (Oct 20).
Temasek subsidiary Xora Innovation led the round, which also drew participation from investors such as venture capital firms Innovation Endeavors and Two Sigma Ventures.
Through its seed and Series A rounds, Cosmos Innovation has raised a total of US$19.7 million. The funds will go towards driving the development process of Cosmos Innovation’s perovskite silicon tandem (PST) solar cell technology, using its artificial intelligence (AI) platform, Mobius. (*see Amendment note)
The platform will work to achieve a “recipe”, referring to a set of process conditions used to fabricate solar cells, for peak PST solar cell efficiency and stability, said Vijay Chandrasekhar, the company’s chief executive officer.
Cosmos Innovation said that while PST has the potential to outperform pure silicon, the current industry standard in solar, its “multilayer architecture” means there are countless possible ways to design the technology, making it slow and costly to find the best design.
The startup said its AI can accelerate the design process to discover the combination of materials, processes and architectures that optimises efficiency and stability. The AI could also automate the manual process of testing and iterating in semiconductor development, which is conventionally based on trial and error.
“Our use of AI-driven experimental design will enable Cosmos Innovation to arrive at the optimal solution with far fewer experiments,” said Chandrasekhar. “This approach will enable us to build highly efficient, cost-effective solar cells in a much shorter time.”
Cosmos was co-founded in 2020 by Chandrasekhar and Joel Li, the company’s chief technology officer.
*Amendment note: A previous version of this story stated that Cosmos Innovation raised US19.7 million in a Series A round, and that it was founded in 2022. Instead, the company raised US$19.7 million for its Seed and Series A round, and was founded in 2020, attributing the incorrect information to a source error. The story has been edited to reflect these.
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