Cosmos Innovation Bags $19.7mn For Perovskite Silicon Tandem Fab Platform

Singapore based Cosmos Innovation, an AI-first company building next-generation perovskite silicon tandem (PST) solar cell technology, today announced raising $19.7 million in total funding. Founded by Vijay Chandrasekhar and Joel Li, the firm raised its Series A round with participation from Xora Innovation, an early-stage, deep-tech investment platform of Temasek, headquartered in Singapore. Other investors joining the round include Innovation Endeavors, which led the seed round; Two Sigma Ventures; DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis; noted MIT professor Tomaso Poggio, a founder of computational neuroscience; Richard Socher, leading natural language processing (NLP) researcher, CEO of You.com and managing partner at AIX Ventures; and Western Technology Investments, one of the leading venture debt funds in Silicon Valley.

Basic Premise-The Future is Tandem , Not Silicon Solar Cells 

The funding will support the company’s fundamentally different approach to developing perovskite silicon tandem solar cell technology. The firm’s basic premise is that no matter how much we try, the efficiency of silicon solar cells will top out at around 27% for practical purposes.

The urgent need for low-cost, high-efficiency solar technology to fuel a fast-growing market can be met when perovskite and silicon, when layered in tandem, increase the practical limit to 36% – driving this S curve will represent the most significant efficiency growth in the history of solar, asserts the firm.

Cosmos Innovation’s answer to the challenge is Mobius, an AI recipe optimization platform. It claims that Mobius has been demonstrated across various sectors, including solar, silicon carbide, advanced data center chips and advanced packaging. It will power Cosmos Innovation’s ambitious endeavor: construction of the world’s first self-learning fab in the solar and semiconductor space.

The Next Generation of Solar Brought to Market with AI
Perovskite silicon tandem has gained solar industry attention because it has the potential to surpass the performance of pure silicon, the industry standard today. However, there are fundamental challenges to overcome to bring this novel design to market. Namely, the multilayer architecture leads to innumerable variations of possible design, making it time consuming and expensive to achieve the optimal “recipe” for peak cell efficiency and stability. Cosmos Innovation is applying Mobius to unlock the full potential of perovskite silicon tandem technology. With the use of advanced AI, Cosmos Innovation aims to develop the world’s most cost-effective, high-efficiency solar cells.

Cosmos Innovation is already claiming remarkable results from the Mobius platform. The company has demonstrated a 10x acceleration in process recipe development time and step-function improvements in target performance metrics with leading semiconductor companies. Mobius can discover a combination of materials, processes and architectures that yields the most efficient solar cells in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of conventional methods.

Experts at the Intersection of AI, Semiconductors and Solar
Founded in 2022, Cosmos Innovation is bringing together experts in AI, semiconductors and solar to give the company a distinct market advantage. Founders Vijay Chandrasekhar and Joel Li, the company’s CTO, have academic and professional careers at the intersection of these three fields, each with expertise leading specialized engineering teams at major research institutes.

Prior to Cosmos Innovation, Chandrasekhar led the AI effort at the Institute for Infocomm Research at the Agency of Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), where he managed a portfolio of more than 50 AI projects across over 10 domains with a key focus on semiconductors. Li was the former group head at the Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore, where he led the development of an award-winning PV manufacturing technology. He also served as an AI team lead at A*STAR, where he led the development and deployment of AI solutions for Tier-1 manufacturers and R&D institutes in the semiconductor, material and chemical domains.

Joel Li, CTO and Co-Founder, added, “Cosmos Innovation has proven AI technology to tackle the combinatorial explosion problem that semiconductor and solar cell process optimization faces. Our proprietary AI system, Mobius, has shown it can accelerate process optimization by up to 10x. It does this by intelligently proposing the next set of materials and process conditions to run. We believe that Mobius will help us solve the last-mile challenges of perovskite silicon tandem solar cells and accelerate its commercialization.”