A solar start-up with a design for doing away with electricity inverters used in solar power systems announced yesterday [July 15] that it has completed its Series A financing round.

GreenRay Inc., based in Westford, Massachusetts, said the financing is for the manufacturing of its solar energy innovation.

“PV systems today are too complex and inverters too unreliable. For more than 15 years I have seen the path to simplify PV for consumers and that’s why we set out to leapfrog today’s approach and create a true modular AC system,” said GreenRay CEO Miles C. Russell.

GreenRay’s patent-pending “AC Module” is a solar PV that produces alternating current (AC) instead of direct current or DC of electricity. Today’s PV modules require additional electrical components to convert DC power to AC power, the kind of electricity that works at home as supplied by the grid. Inverters are a necessary additional cost to make solar systems work. A typical residential solar system would cost around $20,000, but the panel is only about one-third of the cost of a complete system.

The company said that an AC Module would reduce design and installation time and eliminate one of the biggest hurdles to solar power—high up-front cost.

GreenRay was founded in 2006 by former Schott Solar employees. Schott Solar is the American subsidiary of Schott AG, a German technology company. Since its founding, GreenRay said it has received over $3.5 million in government-sponsored funding to demonstrate its AC Module concept, including grants from the Department of Energy and a SEED investment from the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust.

GreenRay’s first financing round was led by California-based Quercus Trust and technology incubator 21Ventures.


- Eric Dorente