Morgan Solar Inc. a Toronto-based solar energy start-up, announced earlier this month that it received $4.7 Million in funding from Iberdrola Group SA, Nypro Inc, and Turnstone Capital Management LLC.
Morgan Solar has developed the Sun Simba HCPV (pictured below), a low-cost High Concentrated Photovoltaic (HCPV) system designed for utility scale and large distributed generation applications. The company has spent the past two years designing, testing, and refining its technology and believes it can have a major impact in the solar energy industry. The company is currently working on a pilot manufacturing facility to build the Sun Simba HCPV with a goal of commercial release in late 2010.
A syndicate led by Turnstone Capital Management LLC and including Inversiones Financieras Perseo SL (the venture initiative of Iberdrola Group) and New Ventures Group LLC (the venture investment subsidiary of Nypro Inc.) will provide Morgan Solar with capital to move from research and development to manufacturing. The $4.7 Million announced represents the completed first tranche of the company's series A investment round; an additional investment tranche is expected to close soon.
Iberdrola Group, one of the world's largest electrical utilities, invested $2.5 million. Pedro Velasco, Director of Non-Energy Businesses at Iberdrola Group said, “Iberdrola’s venture initiative, Inversiones Financieras Perseo SL, is specifically dedicated to investing in early stage, paradigm changing renewable energy technologies that appear to have a very high success potential. We have reviewed hundreds of investment opportunities over the last few years and only invested in Morgan Solar and four others. Their CPV technology is revolutionary, highly efficient and simple to manufacture at very low costs. We see a winner in the making and we took a position as soon as we saw it.”
Nypro Inc, invested $1 million and will be a key partner for Morgan Solar by providing the capacity to quickly scale up manufacturing of the Sun Simba HCPV. Michael Fallon, VP/GM of New Ventures Group at Nypro Inc said, “Nypro is constantly looking for innovations that have the potential to dramatically change an industry, while presenting synergies with our core strengths in injection molding and contract manufacturing around the world. We wanted to enter the solar energy market and we were looking for a next generation technology when we found Morgan Solar.”
Turnstone Capital Management LLC led the formation of the investment syndicate. Marc La Magna, Managing Director at Turnstone Capital commented, “We’re very pleased to have found and invested in Morgan Solar, and believe the company’s technology is a fundamental leap forward in exploiting solar energy effectively. Our views of Morgan Solar’s business model and approach to manufacturing highly efficient solar solutions at competitive cost were quickly validated by our co-investors Iberdrola and Nypro. We look forward to supporting Morgan Solar’s corporate development as it strives to make a significant impact on the PV market in the years to come.”
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