Coimbatore-based Start-up Solavio labs Selected into Canadian Govt’s Accelerator Program

Coimbatore-based start-up, Solavio labs has been selected for acceleration in the 2020 winter cohort by a Canadian accelerator, Energia Ventures.

The cohort program was started on September 14, this year and will culminate on December 9, 2020, in a demo day in which all participants will pitch their businesses and display their products.

Apart from mentoring, programming, and business support, all cohort participants will receive funding from the New Brunswick Innovation Fund (a Canada-based Venture Capital) to help scale their start-ups.

Solar photovoltaic (PV) modules cleaning solutions provider Solavio labs is a start-up incubated at NITI Aayog’s Atal Innovation Mission-backed AIC Raise incubator. It is India’s first Startup Incubation Centre focusing on UNSD goals established by Rathinam Group of Institutions.

Solavio™ is a start-up that designs, develops, and manufactures modular autonomous solar panel cleaning Bots, Semi-Auto Bots, and Motorised Handheld Brushes for cleaning Solar PV panels. 

The main challenge with solar panels is cleaning dust and other impurities which deposit on the surface of the solar PV panels, as it reduces efficiency up to 40 per cent and affect the corresponding ROI for solar plant owners. Therefore, solar panels need to be cleaned from time to time to minimize efficiency losses. As a result, there is a dire need for an economical and effective autonomous dry-cleaning solution for solar PV panels.

The retrofit nature of the Solavio product makes it compatible with almost any solar panel, mounting structure, type (roof-top or ground mount) or climatic condition and is almost 30%* lighter than most bots in the market. 

The company is providing a dry-cleaning technology that is non-abrasive and UV resistant ensuring at least 99.6 per cent cleaning efficiency (99.5 per cent) without affecting the glass surface. The dry-cleaning technology saves more than 200,000 Litres of water per MW every year. In India, WHO has reported that by negating the use of water we can uplift the lives of more than 8,000 individuals per MW of water saved every year. 

Due to its light-weight design, Solavio is disrupting the industry by introducing the Sharable robot concept (1 bot for multiple rows) reducing the cost of switching to robotic cleaning by more than 60% as opposed to the competition offering a bot per row ensuring an ROI in under 2.5 years. 

Commenting on the achievement, Suraj Mohan, CEO of Solavio Labs, said that “the onboarding of Solavio into the Energia Ventures Accelerator program will see them expand their operations to the North Americas. This also means that Solavio is now the 1st PV-focused Clean Tech Start-up to be incubated under support programs in 3 countries (India, UAE and Canada).”  

Additionally, they are in advance discussions with reliable partners to start operations in South East Asia and Australia. 

The company seeks to leverage Robotics, AI, Image processing, machine learning, and deep learning to continue building innovative products that go beyond the cleaning of Solar panels such as drone-based cleaning of High rise building surfaces, UV Sanitization drones and bots, Agricultural bots, Security bots, etc.