The company was founded in 2006 as Solexant (one of the founders was Paul Alivisatos) and was developing cadmium telluride (CdTe) technology to create solar panels.
[2] After the Chinese began dumping silicon solar panels and the American thin-film market worsened,[3] the company decided to pivot and in 2011 hired Brad Mattson to take Solexant in a new direction, which he restarted in 2012.
[7] While in stealth mode, Robert Wendt, former CTO of XsunX[8] and one of the early pioneers of coevaporated CIGS technology, joined as vice president of process and equipment development.
[12] Siva Power announced in May 2015 that Chris McDonald, a factory operations expert from Applied Materials' Solar Business Group and Intel, would become its COO.
[15] Siva Power has also assembled a technical advisory board composed of Dr. Rommel Noufi, Dr. Charlie Gay, Dr. Markus Beck, John Benner, Dr. Bulent Basol, Scott Thomsen, Dr. BJ Stanbery and Dr. Vivek Lall, all photovoltaic and materials experts.
Noufi was the principal scientist of the CIGS technology group at the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and is a consulting professor at Stanford University.
Gay left Siva's advisory board in 2016 when he joined the DOE as director of the SunShot Program, so as to avoid conflict of interest [19] Benner is the executive director of the Bay Area Photovoltaic Consortium, an industry-led consortium managed by Stanford and UC Berkeley charged with funding next-generation PV research at US universities and national laboratories with funds from both the US DoE and its industry members, and Basol has more than 30 years of experience in photovoltaics, beginning with Monosolar, one of the first solar companies.