Rohit Kalyanpur

The Thiel Foundation’s 2019 list of fellows gives his hometown as Sammamish, Washington.⁠[1]

TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry wrote in 2019 that in high school he held research positions in which he studied energy and built a solar charging prototype, at first to charge his own iPhone; he found it odd that solar panels were used mostly on rooftops and in industrial-scale solar grids, saying, “I hadn't seen [anything solar-powered] in the things people use every day other than calculators and lawn lights.” He also found that there were no developer tools for building self-charging products: “nothing you could use to optimize a solar product.”⁠[2]

Illinois ECE wrote in September 2017 that he began developing the solar idea in his senior year of high school after a software update made his phone battery drain quickly: “I used my phone a lot, and when I updated the software it drained my battery really fast.” He worked out the basic technology and design, surveyed potential customers in his neighborhood, and cold-called manufacturers in China to build a prototype of a solar-powered phone case.⁠[3]

Illinois ECE wrote that he began studying in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignUniversity of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignThe University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is a public research university in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, United States, and the flagship campus of the University of Illinois System. Founded in 1867 as Illinois Industrial University, one of America’s original land-grant institutions, it took the name University of Illinois in 1885.Open the full entry in 2016; a profile page on the website of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability states that he majored in computer engineering. The September 2017 Illinois ECE article lists him as an ECE undergraduate in the class of 2020 and states that when he arrived on campus in fall 2016 he had a working prototype and was looking for a business partner.⁠[4][5][3]

Arena Magazine wrote in August 2026 that he was 19 and a computer engineering student at the University of Illinois when he began working on solar energy.⁠[6]

Illinois ECE wrote that he met Paul Couston of the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering (ISE) in a startup law course, when Couston was a freshman in general studies (the article spells the surname “Coustin” in one place). The Daily Illini’s Technograph wrote in November 2017 that the two had been partners for a little more than a year and that he was then a second-year engineering student; he said, “Initially, I wanted Paul on the team for his design and CAD skills,” and, “I really admire his hustler mentality which has pushed our company forward.”⁠[3][7]

University of Illinois engineering news wrote that he and Paul Couston founded Optivolt Labs in summer 2017, developing their product with funding and lab space from the iVenture Accelerator, a university-run seed investment program; Illinois ECE wrote in September 2017 that the company had joined the year-long iVenture Accelerator incubator and received a $10,000 grant and workspace at the start of summer 2017. ESG Today and Arena Magazine also wrote in 2026 that he founded Optivolt in 2017.⁠[8][9][3][10][6]

The company’s first product was Particle, a solar phone case for the iPhone made of an inner protective case and an outer case holding the battery and solar panel, which charges from both indoor and outdoor light; Illinois ECE wrote that it could triple the phone’s battery life. Its target customers included students, remote workers, business professionals, travelers and outdoor enthusiasts. Couston said, “Rohit and I are a really good team because he focuses on the circuitry and electronics, and I focus on the design.”⁠[3][7]

Illinois ECE wrote that the two were finalists and won an in-house prize at the 2017 Cozad New Venture Competition; their mentor was Harlee Sorkin, entrepreneur-in-residence at EnterpriseWorks in the Research Park, who said, “They are focused on finding the right technical solution to an existing customer problem.” The team typically worked from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.; its next steps were customer discovery, choosing a manufacturer and fundraising, including a Kickstarter campaign, pre-orders on its website and a seed round. The December 2019 Illinois ECE article states that while at IllinoisIllinoisIllinois is a state of the United States that borders Lake Michigan and the states of Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri and Iowa; its capital is Springfield and its largest city is Chicago. It was admitted to the Union on December 3, 1818, as the 21st state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 12,812,508.Open the full entry he won the Illini Ideas pitch competition, the Harper Entrepreneurship Fund scholarship and the Cozad New Venture Competition.⁠[3][4]

University of Illinois engineering news wrote in August 2018 that the phone case had entered a saturated market at a price well above other phone cases, and that the company also had to teach customers how solar power works and deal with the legal issues of bringing a new product to market; in winter 2018 it reached a low point, Couston saying, “We had no customers and no money remaining in our bank account.” The two applied to 15 accelerator programs and were rejected by all but the last, Techstars Chicago, after which they received $120,000 in seed funding and joined the Techstars network of entrepreneurs.⁠[8][9]

The two thus became the youngest founders ever at Techstars Chicago; the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability profile calls him the youngest founder to complete the Techstars Chicago Accelerator (2018). The company then applied its solar-to-battery technology to drones: adding solar panels extended a drone’s effective flight time and let it recharge after landing on a sunny day. Couston said, “We found out what the problem was in the drone industry: batteries suck.” The company then had three other full-time engineers; the team photo names Daniel Kofman, Jayson Dombele, Paul Couston, Kalyanpur himself and Plengrapin Buason. He and Couston coordinated engineering, set market strategy and raised the next round of capital.⁠[8][9][5]

The August 2018 article states that he and Couston had put their classes on hold to develop the company. The UCLA profile and the December 2019 Illinois ECE article state that he left after his sophomore year; TechCrunch wrote in 2019 that he attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for two years and dropped out together with his fellow student Couston to found the company, and that Couston had helped manage and invest the university’s $10 million green fund.⁠[8][5][4][2]

On July 10, 2019, the Thiel Foundation announced its 2019 class of 22 Thiel Fellows, each of whom receives $100,000 over the two-year program along with mentorship from the foundation’s network of technology founders, investors and scientists; the announcement states that the program, launched in 2011, encourages talented young people to pursue big ideas and start companies instead of attending college. He is item 19 on the list, with Chicago, Illinois, as his current location, in “Decentralized Energy,” with Optivolt Labs as his project; the announcement describes Optivolt Labs as developing remarkably efficient solar arrays that easily integrate to power existing devices such as drones, scooters and robotics.⁠[1]

TechCrunch wrote in August 2019 that he had recently been given a Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry, describing it as a two-year program that includes a $100,000 grant to young people who want to build new things, along with mentorship and key introductions; Illinois ECE wrote that he was named a Thiel Fellow for his initial work at the University of Illinois.⁠[2][4]

TechCrunch wrote on August 22, 2019 that he was 21, living in Chicago and planning to move to the San Francisco Bay Area the following month; Optivolt Labs then had four people, and the article states that entering the Techstars Chicago accelerator was the push the company needed and that it had gained momentum since.⁠[2]

The article states that Optivolt says it has developed efficient power transfer systems, solar developer and simulation tools and cloud-based APIs which together let fleets of machines charge themselves in ambient light, with target products including e-scooters, electric vehicles, drones, sensors and other connected devices; he declined to give specifics on how it works but said the technology works with existing batteries and can store energy rather than only power a device in real time, and that it “seamlessly integrates into everyday products, so you don't have to change the product design meaningfully.” The article states that “enterprise fleets” had signed on for pilot programs, with testing to begin soon.⁠[2]

The company had raised a $1.75 million seed round from individual investors, including the Eventbrite co-founders Kevin Hartz and Julia Hartz, TJ ParkerTJ ParkerTJ Parker is the co-founder and former CEO of the online pharmacy PillPack and a co-founder of the healthcare company General Medicine, where he became full-time CEO in October 2026.Open the full entry, founder and CEO of PillPack (which the article describes as now an AmazonAmazonAmazon is a publicly traded U.S. technology and retail company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, with its principal corporate offices in Seattle. Its businesses span e-commerce, logistics and fulfillment, digital advertising, membership and entertainment services, consumer electronics, and Amazon Web Services cloud computing.Open the full entry subsidiary), the Pinterest COO Françoise Brougher and the former GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry SVP Jeff Lutz; it planned to use the money to hire more engineering talent, its top priority being to see how the technology performed in the field.⁠[2]

Illinois ECE wrote on December 9, 2019 that he had been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in energy for his work with Optivolt Labs (the article calls them 2019 honorees), with a photo caption naming him as CEO and founder of Optivolt Labs; the article states that the company was developing a portable solar system that could power e-scooters, electric vehicles and drones using only ambient light, and that he hoped the charger could fill a scooter battery as quickly as a wall outlet in bright sunlight (a point the article attributes to ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry). The UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability profile lists the honor as Forbes 30 Under 30 in Energy, 2020.⁠[4][5]

A profile page on the website of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability lists him as a 2020 nominee for the Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award in clean energy (United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry, North America), nominated by Katherine Keating, and gives his age as 22; the page states that he is founder and CEO of Optivolt Labs, which was building a solar integration platform that lets electric machines such as sensors, devices, electric vehicles and deployable generators charge themselves from ambient light, and that it had raised $2.57 million to date.⁠[5]

The page states that the company’s product Ghost is a portable solar and battery generator rated at 10 kW of persistent output, a modular system that packs 70 kW of solar and a 240 kWh battery into a standard ISU-90 container that can be moved by air and sea; that the U.S. Air Force uses Ghost to replace diesel generators across the U.S. Department of DefenseU.S. Department of DefenseThe U.S. Department of Defense is an executive department of the United States federal government, formed in 1949 from the National Military Establishment created in 1947 and headquartered at the Pentagon. The department’s website describes it as America’s oldest and largest government agency.Open the full entry, reducing ground fuel resupply missions and allowing power to be deployed rapidly at forward operating bases; and that each 10 kW diesel generator replaced offsets 25 metric tons of carbon emissions a year.⁠[5]

CleanTechnica wrote on May 25, 2022 about Optivolt’s Pulse module, which replaces the standard bypass-diode arrangement in a solar panel with a more complex design that rebalances power between cells, limiting the drop in output under partial shade to 20–30% rather than the near-total loss common with standard diodes. The article names him as Optivolt’s founder and chief executive; he said that “225 terawatt-hours of energy production was untapped in 2021 due to the limits of today's solar technology,” that this “represents roughly $29B in electricity generation,” and that “the real figure could be much higher,” his estimate assuming that global solar installations were shaded 1% on average with a 5% standard deviation.⁠[11]

Alain Rothstein, a partner at Atlas Innovate, said in the article that the technology “enables the use of solar in new markets that are in dire need of 'must-work' critical power,” and named 5G infrastructure and the industrial internet of things as examples.⁠[11]

Arena Magazine described him on August 28, 2026 as a Thiel Fellow and gave his age as 28. The article states that Optivolt’s Power Balancer sits inside the panel and redistributes energy among substrings in real time, letting weaker cells draw on stronger ones, and that it replaces bypass diodes and removes two of every three junction boxes, four of every six connectors, and the trunk cables and combiner boxes; that it is 99.4% efficient in typical conditions, so that about 0.6% of the energy passing through is lost as heat; and that the company holds 13 patents on the architecture, with 25 pending.⁠[6]

The article states that Optivolt’s chief architect, Linda Irish, holds more than 40 electronics patents and previously designed power systems for a Jupiter satellite program and wireless-power systems at QualcommQualcommQualcomm is a semiconductor and wireless technology company headquartered in San Diego, California. Founded in 1985 by Irwin Jacobs and six other former Linkabit colleagues, it built its business on CDMA technology and now rests on two pillars: its Snapdragon chip platforms and the licensing of cellular standard-essential patents. It has faced antitrust investigations and litigation in many jurisdictions, and in recent years has expanded into automotive, IoT, PCs and AI data centers.Open the full entry; that the company spent four years defining new module-integrated safety test standards with UL, work partly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy; that the Power Balancer is built in Mexico and integrated into panels assembled in CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry, with a 30-year warranty; and that the company had shipped more than 20,000 off-grid units and held U.S. military and government contracts, with a residential system launching in California in 2026 and the first utility-scale deployment planned for later in 2026.⁠[6]

The article lists the company’s own claims, which it did not independently verify: up to 50% more system-level energy in real-world shaded conditions, up to six times the yield in heavy shade, and a residential levelized cost of energy (LCOE) about 30% below a conventional system’s, varying by home; and, in a 250-megawatt simulation, 13.8% more energy under heavy dust and soiling, worth $42 million to $60 million in additional lifetime revenue per site. It also cites a separate study finding that shaded cells can reach nearly 200 °C in hotspot testing. The article gives his view that off-grid data centers powered by solar and batteries are years away, and states that the team is also looking at space-based solar, where it sees its aerospace engineering applying almost directly.⁠[6]

Pulse 2.0 wrote on October 21, 2026 that Optivolt had raised a $32 million Series A (an announcement by the company, as ESG Today puts it) led by VXI Capital, with participation from RA Capital, Valo Ventures and Atlas Innovate, bringing its total capital raised to $42 million; its investors also include Tom Werner, former CEO of SunPower, Paul Nahi, founding CEO of Enphase, and Richard Kauffman, former Chairman of Energy and Finance for New York. ESG Today, Electronics For You and Mercom India also wrote about the round in the following days; ESG Today describes Optivolt as a power electronics company based in San Francisco.⁠[12][10][13][14]

The articles relay the company’s statements that the Power Balancer places active power electronics inside the solar panel and manages energy among groups of cells in real time to reduce losses from shading, dirt, weather, debris and uneven degradation; that it replaces conventional bypass diodes and integrates rapid shutdown and monitoring, which the company says removes the need for separate module-level optimizers, microinverters or rapid-shutdown devices; that in internal tests under defined shading conditions the company’s panels produced up to six times as much power as panels with bolted-on optimizers; that more than 20,000 panels with the Power Balancer had shipped; that the company holds 19 issued patents with 27 applications pending and UL certifications covering its integrated junction-box enclosure, module-integrated electronics, rapid-shutdown system and module safety; and that it applied aerospace design principles, assembling engineers with satellite power experience, to equipment “intended to operate for decades without repair.” The company says the money is to expand manufacturing and deployment across residential, commercial and utility-scale solar, including projects meant to power AI data centers.⁠[12][13][14][10]

As founder and CEO he said, “Solar became cheap enough to compete. I founded Optivolt to make it intelligent enough to power the world,” and, “The next step is putting it everywhere.” He also said, “For nine years, we've rebuilt the solar panel from first principles, embedding aerospace-grade power electronics,” and, “The result is the first solar panel system that thinks for itself.” Orin Hoffman, managing director at VXI Capital, said, “Optivolt has spent nine years building the architecture for that future.”⁠[12][14][10]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[15]