Optivolt Raises $32M to Build the Brain for Solar Panels of the Future

Series A led by VXI Capital, with backing from the people who built modern solar, including founding Enphase CEO Paul Nahi, former SunPower CEO Tom Werner and former New York energy czar Richard Kauffman

Nine years in the making, Optivolt's energy intelligence turns passive solar hardware into adaptive power systems by managing energy in real time from within the panel

SAN FRANCISCO, October 21, 2026--Optivolt, a power electronics company building the intelligence layer for solar, today announced a $32M Series A led by VXI Capital, a new hard tech fund founded by the former CTO of the Defense Innovation Unit of the U.S. Military, with participation from RA Capital, Valo Ventures, and Atlas Innovate. This round brings Optivolt's total capital raised to date to $42M.

The solar panel has become a commodity. Optivolt gave it a brain. Its Power Balancer embeds active power electronics directly into the panel, managing energy among cell groups in real time to recover power otherwise lost to shade, weather, dirt and uneven degradation. This creates a foundation for adaptive, connected solar systems. With more than 20,000 panels incorporating the Power Balancer already shipped, the company will use the new financing to expand manufacturing and bring the technology to solar systems at every scale, from individual homes to utility-scale projects designed to help power AI data centers.

"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. "For nine years, we've rebuilt the solar panel from first principles, embedding aerospace-grade power electronics so it can respond to Earth as it actually is, not the ideal conditions of a lab. The result is the first solar panel system that thinks for itself – one that adapts to shade, weather, dirt and degradation in real time, recovering energy conventional solar leaves behind. The next step is putting it everywhere."

"The next era of energy will not be built by simply installing more of the same passive solar panels we already have. It will be built by making solar intelligent enough to become the backbone of the global power system," said Orin Hoffman, Managing Director at VXI Capital. "Optivolt has spent nine years building the architecture for that future. This financing is about taking it from a technical breakthrough to the platform on which the next generation of solar is built."

"At Enphase, we transformed rooftop solar by managing power at the output of each panel. Today, rising panel power, the widespread adoption of storage, and the urgent need to reduce costs demand a new approach. Optivolt is bringing a new class of power electronics inside the panel itself to unlock the next leap in performance and economics," said Paul Nahi, the founding CEO of Enphase and Optivolt investor. "I helped build the last generation of solar power electronics. At Optivolt we are building the next."