Cosmos Innovation, an artificial intelligence (AI)-first company building next-generation perovskite silicon tandem (PST) solar cell technology, has on Thursday announced raising $19.7 million in total funding.
Cosmos Innovation said in a statement that the Series A round was led by Xora Innovation, an early-stage, deep-tech investment platform of Temasek, a global investment company headquartered in Singapore.
Other investors joining the round include Innovation Endeavors, which led the seed round; Two Sigma Ventures; DeepMind Chief Executive Officer Demis Hassabis; noted MIT professor Tomaso Poggio, a founder of computational neuroscience; Richard Socher, leading natural language processing (NLP) researcher, Chief Executive Officer of You.com and Managing Partner at AIX Ventures; and Western Technology Investments, one of the leading venture debt funds in Silicon Valley.
According to the statement, the funding will support the company’s fundamentally different approach to developing perovskite silicon tandem solar cell technology.
The funding coincides with Cosmos Innovation’s unveiling of Mobius, the industry’s pioneering AI recipe optimization platform.
Mobius has been demonstrated across various sectors, including solar, silicon carbide, advanced data center chips and advanced packaging.
This platform fuels Cosmos Innovation’s ambitious endeavor: construction of the world’s first self-learning fab in the solar and semiconductor space.
Cosmos Innovation is reinventing the historically manual, trial-and-error-based development process for semiconductors by using AI to optimize and speed up the experimental design, test and iterate loop.
The company is on the forefront of using AI to build disruptively better physical, science-based technologies.
Cosmos Innovation plans to build the world’s first self-learning fab in this space and expects its approach to yield best-in-class performance for perovskite silicon tandem solar cells.
According to the statement, PST has gained solar industry attention because it has the potential to surpass the performance of pure silicon, the industry standard today.
However, it said 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.
It said 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.
It is noted that Cosmos Innovation is already seeing remarkable results from the Mobius platform.
The company has demonstrated a ten times acceleration in process recipe development time and step-function improvements in target performance metrics with leading semiconductor companies.
It is also noted that 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.
“Mainstream silicon solar technology is reaching its technological limits,
“Our innovative AI process optimization platform enables us to accelerate the once-in-a-lifetime platform shift to perovskite silicon tandem technology in the solar industry,” said Vijay Chandrasekhar, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Cosmos Innovation.
“Our use of AI-driven experimental design will enable Cosmos Innovation to arrive at the optimal solution with far fewer experiments,
“This approach will enable us to build highly efficient, cost-effective solar cells in a much shorter time, which is key to meeting the ambitious net zero targets being set around the world,” he added.
Meanwhile, Cosmos Innovation Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder Joel Li said the firm 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 10 times. 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,” he said.
Xora Innovation Managing Director Phil Inagaki said that Cosmos Innovation has assembled some of the world’s leading minds in AI, semiconductor manufacturing and solar to create Mobius – the first AI platform that enables self-learning fabrication of complex semiconductor devices.
“The application of Mobius to PST solar cells promises to deliver more cost-effective, reliable and efficient modules on an accelerated timeline,” he said.
He also said Cosmos Innovation exemplifies the technical and market expertise emerging from the Singapore research and development (R&D) ecosystem.
Innovation Endeavors Founding Partner Dror Berman said that AI is transforming the way science gets done.
“Cosmos Innovation is at the forefront of AI innovation for the solar and semiconductor industries, driving a radically different approach for process recipe development,
“Cosmos Innovation is at the confluence of the company’s proven AI capabilities and the massive trillion-dollar opportunity emerging from silicon solar technology reaching its fundamental limits,” he added.
Two Sigma Ventures Partner Colin Beirne said that the beauty of AI is its ability to positively surprise people – to reach for solutions that elude their human brains because of their biology and conditioning.
“AI thrives in situations of complexity and large parameter spaces – like semiconductor development,
“Cosmos Innovation is harnessing these capabilities, and building a tremendous team of experts, with a goal of reaching new heights in perovskite silicon tandem solar cell efficiency,” he added.
Singapore’s Cosmose valued at $500M after latest strategic Investment from NEAR Foundation