2024 MIT Houston Symposium: Startup Exchange - Active Surfaces

SHIV BHAKTA: Howdy. I'm Shiv, CEO and Co-Founder of Active Surfaces. That's me on the left. I come from ExxonMobil. I grew up here in Houston and worked at the US DOE before coming to MIT.

My co-founder is actually the smart guy. He invented this stuff, along with these prolific MIT professors, Vladimir Bulovic, who runs MIT.nano, and Moungi Bawendi, who won a Nobel Prize last year. We also have advisors like Seth Coe Sullivan, who have spun out and sold multiple deep tech companies.

So what do we do? Who here has seen a solar panel? A ton, right? They're one-meter-by-two-meter bricks. They're normally in the middle of nowhere. We think that solar has grown tremendously, and it has. This is a chart of every year's IEA projection of how quickly solar will be adopted over the next 10 years. And you can see that we've outpaced it year over year for 20 years straight.

But let's put this growth in perspective. Right now, if you add up the entire solar capacity of the entire planet, we're at one terawatt. To achieve net zero, we need the minimum 20 terawatts. This gap is equivalent to the world's largest solar farm, which is in India, a couple of gigawatts. It's three times the size of Cambridge, Mass. That size being deployed every single day for two decades, that's what we need.

But there's barriers to this level of scale. Transmission is a big pain because people don't want transmission in their backyards, and it's hard to get the power from North Texas to the coast. Soft costs are dominating the installation costs now. The modules are cheap, but labor and structural support is expensive. And then energy security's a big issue, because 95% of those one-meter-by-two-meter panels are made in China.

All of this is happening because a core technology that we are working with is based with silicon. It's in a glass-packaged module, and it's heavy. That form factor has been the same for 50 years. If you Google "solar panel White House" in the 1970s, that same exact form factor existed.

What we're offering is something entirely new. This is 100 times lighter, can be integrated into any surface, could be on fabrics or plastics, and could be rolled around like a yoga mat and then deployed on buildings. If you want to come see it later, we're over there.

We're not the first company to think of flexible solar. This has been around for 20 years. But we're the first company to do it at a cost that actually makes sense for wide-scale adoption. We do this because our efficiencies are high, our manufacturing input materials are low, and then we're able to have the benefit of the form factor without lower performance.

We unlocked this with three different innovations. Manufacturing, packaging, and materials. For manufacturing, we do roll-to-roll manufacturing. Imagine like a big Polaroid plant or New York Times where you print. We do that multiple times for each layer of the semiconductor.

For packaging, we have innovation that allow us to decouple the substrate you're printing on to the final device package, which means that if you print on glass, you're stuck on glass. For us, you can print on a piece of plastic and then laminate it onto whatever the hell you want. Fabrics, glass, plastics. No other company can do that.

And then materials, we use commodity materials that could be sourced from your region. So if you build a plant in America, you could source your materials in America, or from Europe, or from South Asia, or from East Asia, from wherever you're locally manufacturing. And you could do it using commodity, domestically sourced materials that aren't susceptible to supply chain risks. So none of this together has been possible.

In a summary, we're cheaper than solar today. We're glass-free and flexible. We're locally sourced. We're way lighter. Same performance and faster install. This can go literally anywhere from facades to roofs to shades. And this is what it would look like on a commercial building, like a yoga mat being deployed and rolled out.

In terms of development, we spun out of-- technology's validated in '22. We won some prizes and some big checks early '23. Got support from climate tech accelerators, have raised $5.5 million, and use that to build our manufacturing research facility.

And now we set ambitious goals for this year, to move faster than any solar and older-- to move faster than any solar company in history. We tried to do these four things by the end of '24. Make a solar module, make a solar roll, get some commercial interest, and do an outdoor demo. If we could do any of these, that'll be faster than any solar company.

So where are we? We made our first solar module 3Q '24. We made our first solar roll, which is here. I'll unravel it as I talk about the next stuff. That's us on a commercial install. And then we also have our first outdoor demo scheduled for next month-- or this month. It's December now.

A quick history on our connection to Houston. Solar is big in North Texas. I'm sure you guys know this. Scale-up expertise is big here. I worked for Exxon. I've seen these big refineries. We know how to build things. And then I grew up here. So I went to Cy-Fair High, U of H, Exxon. I'm a Houston alum.

So my ask here is if you own a building or you're interested in the application of solar in your operations, let me know. Or if you just want to high-five and support a new technology, always down for that. Thank you.

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