Active Surfaces: From Nano Explorations to Startup
Tuesday, June 11, 2024
11 a.m. — 11:45 a.m. ET
Richard Swartwout
Chief Technology Officer, Active Surfaces
On March 31 2020, Dr. Richard Swartwout gave a talk titled, “Manufacturing large-area perovskite thin film: the good, the bad, and the ugly"—work that would eventually develop into his PhD thesis and encompass multiple patents solving manufacturing issues in halide perovskite photovoltaics. Graduating in 2021 and leaving MIT in 2022, Swartwout now continues scaling up thin-film perovskite and organic photovoltaics though Active Surfaces, an MIT spinout dedicated to making flexible solar a reality. In this talk, Swartwout shares the journey, from the early beginnings forming the company in the summer of 2022, to winning the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition and becoming venture backed with an oversubscribed pre-seed round of >$5M. The journey is just beginning!