Enphase Energy nabs another $63M

<p>Enphase Energy, a fast-growing solar startup in Petaluma, landed its second round of funding this year with $63 million in investment, the company announced Thursday.</p><p>The four-year-old company raised $40 million in March and $22.5 million last year.</p><p>The company, founded four years ago, has nearly doubled in size in less than a year, from 55 employees last May to more than 100 this year. Most of those employees are located in Petaluma.</p><p>The latest round of funding comes as further proof that new companies are sprouting from the ashes of Sonoma County's once robust telecommunication industry, which melted down early last decade. Telecom engineers and entrepreneurs began looking for the next big business, and many have focused on alternative energy.</p><p>“There is a real future for clean tech and green jobs in Sonoma County,” said Ben Stone, director of Sonoma County's Economic Development Board. “As guys like Enphase succeed, others will benefit, whether it's suppliers or just collaborative energy.”</p><p>Enphase was launched in 2006 by two Sonoma County telecom veterans, Martin Fornage and Raghu Belur, with the idea of increasing the efficiency of solar panels.</p><p>Fornage, who is now chief technology officer for the company, was an early employee at Advanced Fiber Communications in Sonoma County. Belur, the company's head of marketing, had worked at Cerent.</p><p>They designed an innovative method for making solar panels convert energy more efficiently.</p><p>Solar panels use the sun to generate electricity in the form of a direct current(DC). But household appliances require an alternating current(AC).</p><p>In traditional solar arrays, every panel is connected to one inverter that does the conversion. But if one panel was dirty or in the shadow of a nearby tree, it essentially dragged down the performance of the other panels because they all shared one inverter.</p><p>Fornage and Belur designed a micro-inverter that is connected to each panel, meaning that if one panel is lagging, it won't reduce the energy output of the others.</p><p>The latest round of funding came from a group of investors that included Menlo Park venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.</p><p>The funds will enable Enphase to accelerate product development, launch global expansion and strengthen its balance sheet, according to the company.</p>