Heliatek raises €18M for third generation solar cell manufacturing facility

Funding

Heliatek GmbH, a spin-out from the universities of Dresden and Ulm, has raised €18 million in a second round of financing led by the pan-European venture capital firm Wellington Partners. Also participating in this round were industry investor Robert Bosch and the corporate venture capital investors, RWE Innogy Ventures and BASF Venture Capital, the High-Tech-Gründerfonds, eCAPITAL entrepreneurial Partners AG, the Technologiegründerfonds and GP Bullhound Sidecar.

Heliatek will use the new funding primarily to build an initial production facility in Dresden for its third generation, flexible and very lightweight photovoltaic modules on a film substrate. These will weigh 500 grams per square metre, compared to the current 20 kilogrammes per square metre for photovoltaic cells, opening up the market for mobile applications, allowing architects and engineers to make photovoltaic arrays an integral part of a building’s design, and generating electricity in regions that are remote from centralised grids.

Speaking on behalf of the other investors, Alexander Flaig, Vice President Corporate Research at Robert Bosch, said, “Over the course of the past two years, Heliatek has made impressive progress in terms of the efficiency and service life of its organic solar cells. The time has now come to also show just how cost-efficiently these cells can be manufactured under industrial conditions. This round of financing will enable the company to execute this important step.”

Formed in 2006 as a spin-out from Dresden and Ulm universities, Heliatek is developing organic solar cells based on organic dyes that are synthesised from hydrocarbons. In August 2009, the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE) certified a power conversion efficiency of 6.1 per cent for a solar cell of this type from Heliatek.