Powering the Space Economy

Arinna is named after the Goddess of the Sun for a reason. The Stanford-born startup is building next-generation solar technology for space.

“The dream of thin-film photovoltaics has always been to make a PV technology that can truly be put anywhere in an affordable manner, to make power accessible to anyone, anywhere,” says Alex Shearer, PhD ’24, cofounder and chief technology officer.

Experts predict that the space industry will require 3 gigawatts—or 1 billion watts—by 2035, partly due to new satellites being launched at a record rate. According to research published in Nature, Earth could be orbited by a half-million satellites before 2040, if the U.S. Federal Communications Committee (FCC) were to approve all filings for launch.

Space is the ultimate proving ground. Arinna cofounder and CEO Koosha Nazif, MS ’16, PhD ’21, explains the startup has applications on Earth as well, from incorporating solar into building facades and electric vehicles to wearables such as self-charging watches. But powering the space industry is such an imperative, those prospective clients tend to focus more on performance than price tags.

In fact, an analysis published in Nature Energy found that aerospace clients are willing to pay a premium of 10 to 100 times over what terrestrial clients would pay—counting the investment worth the cost in the latest space race.

This December, Arinna will ship its lightweight panels to the International Space Station on a mission to collect six months of continuous data on voltage and current as a test demonstration of how its technology fares in the low Earth orbit, or LEO. Most commercial satellites reside in this altitude of up to 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) above the Earth.

“It would be a great testimonial to be able to say, ‘Oh, this survived the harshest environment. It will survive your backyard,” says Nazif.

New experimental data, also published in Nature, hypothesize that transistors made from ultrathin molybdenum disulfide, the most widely studied type of this next-generation material called TMDs, could survive for some 271 years in geosynchronous orbit, which is even more extreme than the low Earth orbit.

Packing light for space

The Arinna team is using a novel semiconductor technology that could replace or augment silicon with 10 times higher power per mass.

Transition metal dichalcogenides, or TMDs, have been used in industrial applications for over a century, typically as lubricants. In the past two decades, researchers have begun exploring TMDs for electronic devices, such as solar panels.

“It turns out they have excellent properties for photovoltaic application,” says Nazif.

TMDs are made of two types of elements sandwiched together: a transition metal, such as molybdenum or tungsten, and a chalcogen, such as sulfur. These different layers have a weak affinity for each other. When thinned down to the nanoscale, TMDs become highly effective semiconductors. They are part of a class of materials nicknamed 2D semiconductors because they are so narrow—only a few atoms thick—that electrons inside can only move left, right, forward, and backward, but not up or down. The slim profile of the underlying technology means that Arinna solar panels are 15 times thinner than a piece of paper.

“It could be a thousand times thinner than silicon films and provide the same light absorption and power generation,” he says, noting how their flexible panels can bend tighter than the circumference of a pencil.

The durable material can withstand the sun’s radiation without a protective glass shield, allowing them to be rolled up for transport—a boon for launches that are more constrained by volume than by weight. You know how more clothes fit in your suitcase rolled than stacked? It turns out the same rule applies in rocket ships.

A flexible future

Nazif arrived at Stanford as a mechanical engineering doctoral student chasing two things: the right photovoltaic technology and a cofounder. The hunt ran so deep that he switched to electrical engineering to get at the physics of semiconductors and photovoltaic materials, advised by Professor Krishna Saraswat. After three years of screening materials, he found the tech he was looking for in a neighboring lab—Professor Eric Pop’s group, which he’d later join as a postdoctoral scholar.

Shearer was a chemical engineer completing his PhD in Professor Stacey Bent’s lab, where Intel, Samsung, and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC) often sponsor projects. He diverted his plans to be an academic researcher because entrepreneurship had “even more of an opportunity to drive translation. I think that’s really what pushed me over the edge,” he says.

“The tech was just way too exciting. Koosha was too good of a CEO. The opportunity was so good.” 

The two engineers connected through a collaborative that Nazif had created to learn more about TMDs, inviting 12 top tier research groups from around the world.

“We put this technology on the map and built the first prototype of this material that showed in the lab that we can achieve 10 times more power per mass and power per volume compared to any other alternative on the market—quite unprecedented,” he says.  

“I pitched the idea of Alex joining the company, and thankfully he said yes, and here we are.”

In 2024, an Innovation Transfer Grant from the TomKat Center let the cofounders iterate at Stanford and fly up to a leading thin-film manufacturer in Seattle to test their proof-of-concepts. Using Shearer’s doctoral expertise, Arinna has developed a solution-phase processing of TMDs for photovoltaics—an approach that is relatively easy and inexpensive.

“It’s low temperature. It doesn’t require a vacuum,” says Shearer. “That technique would eventually allow you to make something that is roll-to-roll compatible.”

Roll-to-roll manufacturing is a method where flexible materials are unrolled, processed, and rewound onto a new roll, similar to printing a newspaper. The speed of roll-to-roll processing could allow the technology to ramp up rapidly.

In an industry where space-bound PVs can have a 12- to 18-month lead time, according to Arinna’s interviews with dozens of customers, the team hopes to fulfill orders in two weeks flat. The nine-person company is now based in South San Francisco, with plans to scale up after a successful seed round of $4 million in February 2026.

In effect, Arinna is building a printing press for solar—feeding in a roll, printing the TMDs, and turning out power generation at the pace and scale needed to build the space economy of the future.

This article is part of the TomKat Center Spotlight series designed to highlight the impact and trajectory of the work of faculty and students who received funding through our Innovation Transfer Program, TomKat Solutions, and Graduate Fellowships. Stanford University does not endorse any non-Stanford entities, programs, products, or services listed in the article.