ActLight named Cool Vendor by Gartner

The prominent analyst firm Gartner identifies new Cool Vendors each year in key technology areas, and publishes research reports on these innovative vendors and their products and services. Kooaba and Dacuda were named cool vendors recently. Now ActLight has been selected as one of four companies in the area of semiconductors.

ActLight is working on a new generation of very small solar-modules. Conventional solar-cells, still to this day remain very bulky and perform poorly when used for small electronics solutions is deployed in suboptimal lighting conditions. The startup of co-founder and CEO Serguei Okhonin has developed minuscule solar-modules, which thanks to its integration on semiconductor chips, are able to address these problems by enhancing their respective performances by a factor of one-thousand. Potential applications for this product are numerous, e.g. powering consumer electronics devices or in the context of monitoring the environment or measure energy consumption.

In its analysis Gartner mentions two aspects as cool:

• Cost reduction. Because the smart solar modules are built using a standard CMOS process, the cost of integrating the solar cells into standard circuits is low.
• Licensing business model. Unlike other companies in this space that focus on manufacturing and selling chips on their own, ActLight intends to license the intellectual property (IP) and offer design service and technology advice to its customers.

ActLight was founded in 2011 and is based in Lausanne.