US-based solar technology startup Solestial has brought on board Margo de Naray as the company’s new chief executive officer (CEO). The company has also raised $17 million in Series A funding to scale up production of silicon PV for space applications.
Naray takes up the CEO position from the company’s founding CEO, Stanislau Herasimenka, who now moves over to the chief technology officer (CTO) position to focus on the company’s product development and operations.
Naray comes to the Solestial team from Astra, where she served as senior VP and GM of Space Products and Services. “We’re seeing tremendous market demand, and we are focused on delivering high-quality products,” said Naray. “We’re hiring, scaling production, and qualifying our technology, which is already deployed on multiple missions in space.”
Solestial is scaling up its manufacturing capacity to 1 MW/year to produce ultra-thin heterojunction (HJT) silicon solar cells with 20% efficiency, which it claims can self-cure radiation damage at normal operating temperatures in space. Engineered in-house, these cells leverage commercially available silicon wafers. Instead of glass and composite substrate, the company uses polymer layers for its thin solar modules, which it says ensures these can operate in the space environment for up to 10 years.
According to Solestial, this capacity is comparable to the estimated annual manufacturing capacity of all US and EU III-V space solar companies combined.
Its manufacturing facility opened in Tempe, Arizona, in 2023. Since then, it has added square footage each year and doubled the workforce. Solestial has also been delivering commercial products to several companies. In August 2024, it collaborated with Meyer Burger to produce solar panels for use in space (see Meyer Burger & Solestial Eye Space For Next-Generation Flexible Modules).
Led by AE Ventures, its $17 million Series A funding round has contributions from new investors, namely Crosscut Ventures, Zeon Ventures and Mitsubishi Electric Corporation’s ME Innovation Fund. Investment has also flowed in from its existing investors – Airbus Ventures, General Purpose Venture Capital, Industrious Ventures, Stellar Ventures, and Techstars.
It raised $10 million in equity financing in 2022 to ramp up production of its technology (see Airbus Ventures Leads Financing Round Of US Start-Up Solestial).
