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As governments worldwide increase investment in solar energy and the twinkling veneers of solar panels proliferate on rooftops and energy farms from Arizona to Australia, it’s clear that sunlight is foundational to a renewable energy future.
With manufacturers rapidly optimizing the cheap fabrication of solar panels, a significant remaining bottleneck is that of power conversion efficiency – the amount of sunlight that can be transformed into electricity. A new startup named Heliotrope Photonics, co-founded by Minh Tran, a PhD in chemical and biomolecular engineering from the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, is looking to shed some (non-UV) light on the issue.
Most solar cells are made of silicon, a material that can efficiently utilize just a few particular wavelengths of solar light to produce energy. It does not convert ultraviolet and blue light into power nearly as well as near-infrared wavelengths, resulting in efficiency rates that top out at under 30%. In response, Heliotrope has developed a coating technology for solar panels that could increase that number by 8- 15%. This light-shifting film converts UV and blue light into the near-infrared frequency that silicon works best with. The process utilizes more of the solar spectrum, produces more electricity per cell and reduces the dollars-per-watt cost.
The genesis of this project was Tran’s PhD research, which she embarked on in 2018 under the mentorship of Dr. Eray Aydil, senior vice dean at Tandon and a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering.
“We wanted to work on something scalable, reproducible and easily commercialized,” Tran recounted. “So we came up with this idea that instead of optimizing expensive materials, how about we turn it around and optimize the sunlight for the solar panels.”
By 2022, Tran and Aydil suspected they had a marketable project on their hands: “We wanted to understand whether there was a market demand for it and whether the benefit we delivered was more than the cost of the coating.”
At this point, Aydil connected Tran with resources on offer at the NYU Entrepreneurial Institute, beginning with startup bootcamp at the Tech Venture Workshop. “It’s a friendly, easy-to-access resource for anyone new to the startup space,” Tran said. “It’s one-on-one entrepreneurial lessons and, during my PhD, I was not really thinking in that way.”
The resulting crash course in navigating startup life helped convince Tran she had the tools required to forge her own path instead of defaulting to a post-PhD role at a big solar tech company. The Workshop brought her to a milestone on that path–the importance of knowing enough to realize how much she didn’t know and of identifying the most important questions that needed answering. “In the lab, it's just technology, but in the business world, there’s so much more to consider,” explains Tran. “How do we understand the supply chain risk, market risk, funding risk, how do we evaluate the value propositions that we can offer to the customers?”
As a practical framework emerged from the workshop, Tran also realized that learning how to communicate those value propositions to stakeholders was key. “It’s the first time I started to talk and think startup-style,” she explains. “In the lab, we talk in specialized language. At the workshop, I realized, oh man, when I talk like that to people outside the lab, nobody understands what I'm saying. It’s not about trying to sound smart or academic, it’s about communicating your ideas to other people in a way they understand.”
Pictured: Minh Tran, PhD, (Tandon '23), onstage during the Panel Discussion at the 2024 NYU Tech Venture Summit
Having absorbed these foundational principles, Tran was able to proceed in strategic fashion. By fall 2023, she had earned her doctorate, launched Heliotrope with CEO and co-founder Conrad Caviezel (NYU Stern, ‘24), and built momentum. With the help of NYU’s Technology Opportunities & Ventures initiative, the company had patented the research and licensed the intellectual property from the university. The team won the Technology Venture Competition Audience Choice Award in the Entrepreneurs Challenge hosted by NYU Stern’s Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship as well as the top prize in the U.S. Department of Energy’s EnergyTech University Prize competition. They also leveraged their learnings from the Tech Venture Workshop to earn a spot in the fall 2023 cohort of the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program, receiving a $50,000 grant and training in Lean Startup Methodology and commercialization strategy.
There was, however, more to learn. “After two years, I was more used to the startup world and had learned how to think like it and communicate better,” says Tran. “I knew what problems I had. But now I had to solve those problems.” She found the resources to help her do so at the Tech Venture Accelerator, the third step in the Entrepreneurial Institute’s offerings to aspiring founders. It offered the team milestone-based funding, extensive mentorship and other resources designed to get startups off the ground. “At that time, we were having trouble ironing out the business model for going quickly to market, raising funds and navigating the risks brought on by fluctuations in government policy,” recalls Tran. Much subsequent problem-solving happened via the mentorship and networking facilitated by the Accelerator - “talking through problems with different people seasoned in startup life.”
Pre-seed funding was one crucial obstacle the Accelerator helped the team navigate. 2024 and 2025 were lean fundraising years given downward trends in investment and government funding. Money for key equipment and materials was short. At this point, Tran turned to her mentors at the Accelerator. “I spoke to Frank Rimalovski (Executive Director of the Institute) and Rebecca Silver (Director),” Tran recounts. “They pointed out that maybe we could find lab partners who couldn’t give dollars but could help with materials. That’s when we realized we could turn our connections with solar manufacturers into collaborations. They send us samples so we can test out their glass or polymers and, in turn, we have our material needs met.”
There are always new horizons to reach for. “Right now, we target solar panels that are in production but we hope that in the future, we can develop a coating that can retrofit panels already installed in the field,” says Tran. “We want to have a whole second line of research to focus on retrofitting old panels.” Thanks in part to having run the NYU entrepreneurial gamut, Heliotrope’s future looks sunny. The company now has an additional lab in Boston testing solar cells rigorously against industry benchmarks. The initial data is promising and the team hopes to finish up the technological validation phase and scale up as early as 2027.
About the Author:
Abhimanyu 'Abhi' Das is a writer, editor, and digital curator based in New York City. He runs editorial and programming for the TEDx initiative at TED Conferences. In his off hours, he dabbles in science communication and film criticism.
