Meet ROSI, a member of the EIC Scaling Club’s Renewable Energies Group and a scale-up that transforms waste flows of the photovoltaic industry into new sources of high-value materials.
The French company was founded in 2017 in Grenoble, where it’s still based. By early 2022, the company had entered the industrial-equipment test phase and revealed plans to construct a factory near Grenoble. In June 2023, the scale-up inaugurated the world’s first industrial recycling line, ROSI Alpes.
The scale-up, undoubtedly, has had quite a journey since its founding days. Read on to learn more about this renewable energy field star.
Photovoltaic (solar) energy is expected to become a significant energy source in Europe in the coming decades. The EU has a legally binding target to increase its solar capacity to at least 700 GW by 2030, which is more than four times the capacity it had in 2020. Due to the rapid installation of solar panels, the demand for raw materials is skyrocketing. This highlights a dual challenge – solutions are needed to reduce the amount of materials required for new panels and to recover the valuable materials already embedded in existing panels. And that’s where ROSI comes in.
ROSI is a pioneer in industrial-scale solar panel recycling, proudly wearing the “first company worldwide” badge when it comes to recovering the most valuable materials embedded in solar panels. The scale-up maximizes the recovery of high-purity materials from end-of-life c-Si-based solar panels through an innovative process.
As stated on the company’s website, ROSI is dedicated to “making the photovoltaic industry a circular model and to reducing its carbon footprint”. The scale-up’s circular products include silicon, silver, copper, aluminium, glass, and advanced materials. Besides that, ROSI offers two types of recycling services – end-of-life solar panels recycling and manufacturing scrap recycling.
The company’s recycled materials have advanced properties that make them a valuable resource for many industries. For example, ROSI’s glass culets offer superior transparency, and the recycled silicon provides high levels of purity when compared to metallurgical-grade silicon.
Behind ROSI stands a team of passionate engineers, scientists, and business leaders with a shared commitment to building a circular economy for the solar industry. Back in 2017, the company was founded by three co-founders – physicist Yun Luo, silicon specialist Guy Chichignoud, and industrial veteran Daniel Bajolet.
Yun Luo has been serving as ROSI’s CEO. She holds a PhD and a post-doc in nanotechnology and material science and has a strong background in developing and applying innovative technologies for alternative and renewable energy sources. Guy Chichignoud is the CTO of the scale-up and is deeply committed to bringing the deeptech from laboratory scale to industrial deployment. He also holds a PhD in Materials Science and Processes, and overall has a vast scientific and research background.
The third co-founder of ROSI, Daniel Bajolet, left the company in 2021 after serving as both CTO and General Manager. Daniel’s industry and business experience played a crucial role in the formation of ROSI’s core team that drives the scale-up’s success.
After the successful launch of ROSI’s first recycling line, ROSI Alpes, in 2023, the company announced expansion to Germany and later to Spain. The scale-up has also been actively establishing international partnerships, with the latest being Waste Experts and City Electrical Factors to recycle solar panels in the UK. Yet, the company's partnerships are wide-ranging, spanning various industries and countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, China, and others.
Besides the partnerships, ROSI actively participates in industry conferences and competitions. Some of the awards the scale-up has received include the World CleanTech StartUPs Awards 2024, the PV Magazine Award in 2022, Startup of the Year by EY France, the "Industry 5.0" award from the European Commission, and many more.
Another milestone in the journey of ROSI was being selected by the EIC Scaling Club network as one of Europe’s highest-potential deep tech scale-ups in March 2024. The company already had a long-standing relationship with EIC, as it had received support from the Council and other EU-backed initiatives, including funding from the EIC as part of the Green Deal initiative.
According to Antoine Chalaux, ROSI’s COO, the EIC support has been invaluable for ROSI’s development. He discussed it on the EIC podcast:
“We are a deep tech company, which means that it takes years to develop the technologies that can be used at an industrial scale. And having the support of the EIC fund was unbelievable for us. EIC was the base of our industrial development.”
The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 120+ European deep tech scale-ups with the potential to build world-class businesses and solve major global challenges come together with investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders to spur growth.
The top 120+ European deep tech companies will be carefully selected from a pool of high-growth scale-ups that have benefitted from EIC financial schemes, other European and national innovation programmes, and beyond.
The EIC Scaling Club is an EIC-funded initiative run in partnership by Tech Tour, Bpifrance (EuroQuity), Hello Tomorrow, Tech.eu (Webrazzi), EurA and IESE Business School.
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