Why We Invested in Photara
By Gemma Shepherd, Max Blanshard and Jacob Bro
Solar is becoming the workhorse of the global energy system. It is now the cheapest and fastest-growing source of electricity on the planet, and will underpin everything from AI infrastructure to industrial electrification and energy security.
Yet it is severely reliant on a single critical material: silver.
The solar industry currently consumes roughly 17% of the world’s annual silver supply. Every silicon solar cell relies on silver paste to form the electrical contacts that collect current from the wafer. And while silver offers strong performance due to its high conductivity and it’s ability to bond well to silicon, it is also becoming cripplingly expensive.
Silver prices have more than doubled in the past year. Today, silver is the single largest material cost in a solar module, accounting for up to 20–30% of total module cost. For an industry already operating on razor-thin margins amid global overcapacity, silver usage creates a structural problem without an obvious fix from existing solutions.
When we first met Brian Hardin and Max L’Etoile, the two brilliant co-founders of Photara based in San Francisco, and realized they were pioneering a solution to this holy grail of solar manufacturing problems, we knew we were facing a massive opportunity.
Brian is a second time founder with two decades of experience in the solar industry who exited his last company after successfully commercializing silver metallisation pastes for the solar industry. Now some of the world’s largest OEMs — who Brian has helped before — are queuing to deploy Photara’s breakthrough technology.
So we are very excited to partner up with Brian and Max on this mission and we are delighted to announce 2150’s lead investment in Photara’s $8.5M latest financing round, alongside Voyager Ventures, Kibo Invest, Ahren Innovation Capital, Prelude Ventures, Pace Ventures, and WovenEarth Ventures.
The silver problem
Solar manufacturers globally spend tens of billions of dollars on silver usage annually, and have been trying to reduce silver consumption for decades.
Most efforts have focused on using less silver within the existing manufacturing process. Manufacturers have steadily reduced line widths, lowered paste volumes, and improved printing precision. These improvements have helped, but each new gain has become harder and more incremental than the last.
Alternative approaches have also struggled. Silver-coated copper pastes can reduce silver consumption but face performance challenges in newer cell architectures such as TOPCon, which now dominate global production. Copper electroplating can eliminate silver entirely, but requires complex wet-chemistry processes, significant capital investment, and has a long history of failed commercialisation attempts.
A different approach
Photara’s breakthrough innovation solves a decade long quest to remove the single biggest cost driver in solar panel manufacturing without compromising product performance and production yields.
Photara has developed a novel copper metallization technology that allows solar manufacturers to replace the majority of the silver used in conventional solar cells. By dramatically reducing dependence on one of the industry’s most expensive and constrained materials, the company offers a compelling new cost lever for solar production.
The technology reduces silver consumption by 60–85% per cell while maintaining, and in some cases improving, cell performance. It is also designed to integrate with existing manufacturing infrastructure, enabling rapid adoption without requiring manufacturers to overhaul their production lines.
Why this team
Brian Hardin, Photara’s CEO, has spent 25 years working on exactly this problem. He holds a Stanford PhD in materials science and previously co-founded Plant PV, a company working on silver reduction in solar cells that was acquired by Hitachi Chemical.
When Brian and his co-founder Max L’Etoile, Photara’s CTO, came through our process, what struck us was not just the quality of their thinking but also how much they had already proven. They had validated their cells with a major solar manufacturer in China, building them into modules that matched or beat the performance of the baseline. And they had done all of this with a small, capital-efficient team, that brings deep experience in robotics, precision tooling, and materials science.
Photara has also developed deep relationships with the ecosystem of top OEMs in China running the worlds largest solar production facilities and is structuring its operations to serve customers at the breakneck speed and scale that Chinese manufacturing demands.
We’re hugely excited by their pace of progress.
Our conviction
At 2150, we look for the cases that deliver compelling economics with the benefit of added sustainability. Photara’s approach of copper metallization offers an exceptional ROI for manufacturers across almost any realistic silver price scenario, and a much-needed margin lever in an industry under intense competitive pressure. As solar continues to power an enormous amount of what comes next, from the AI buildout to the electrification of industry and transport, we’re proud to support Brian, Max, and the Photara team as they make solar manufacturing more affordable and less dependent on constrained critical materials.
We believe Photara’s technology will revolutionize solar cell metallization and replace silver with copper creating dramatic cost reduction and margin expansion for solar cell manufacturing to the huge benefit for the industry, customers, energy and economic progress and ultimately the health of our planet.
2150 is a venture capital firm backing the founders building transformational technologies across energy, industry, materials, and the built environment. Our mission is to provide foundational capital to transform our physical world. For returns and for good. Managing €500m from London and Copenhagen, 2150 invests across Europe and North America. www.2150.vc
