Based in San Jose, CA, Nanosolar developed and briefly commercialized a low-cost printable solar cell manufacturing process.

However, prices for solar panels made of crystalline silicon declined significantly during the following years, reducing most of Nanosolar's cost advantage.

The company received financing from a number of technology investors including Benchmark Capital, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google.

Nanosolar planned to build a large production facility in San Jose, and in Germany at Luckenwalde (Berlin),[10] with an annual capacity of 430 megawatts.

[11] On December 12, 2007 the company announced[12] that it had started solar cell production in its San Jose factory, with its German facility slated to go into operation in the 1st quarter of 2008.

Before joining Nanosolar, Steigele spent more than 30 years in international management and consulting at IBM, where he worked with Fortune 500 global manufacturing companies, including Intel, Hitachi, ABB, Thomson, Siemens, Sony and McKesson, among others.

[18] The company's technology gained early industry recognition with the presentation of a Small Times Magazine award at a leading nanotech business event in 2005.

"[24] Nanosolar developed a suite of in-house capabilities for creating nanostructured components based on various patented and patent-pending techniques.

[28] According to the company at the time, "leveraging recent science advances in nanostructured materials, Nanosolar has developed a proprietary ink that makes it possible to simply print the semiconductor of a high-performance solar cell.

This ink was based on Nanosolar developing various proprietary forms of nanoparticles and associated organic dispersion chemistry and processing techniques suitable for delivering a semiconductor of high electronic quality.

These solar cells successfully blended the needs for efficiency, low cost, and longevity and were designed to be easy to install due to their flexibility and light weight.