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Entrepreneur
putting his energy behind the big chill
Peter Vandermeulen is blunt about why his new startup is emphasizing plans for a new type of air conditioner rather than a new type of solar panel, which the company is also developing to power its AC unit.
“Solar is not all that popular with investors right now,” said Vandermeulen, who changed the name of the Woburn-based company last year to 7AC Technologies Inc. from its original name, 7Solar Technologies.
Vandermeulen and members of his small but experienced team are seeking to raise $3 million to $5 million in venture capital this year, as the company seeks to commercialize its liquid dessicant chiller technology, which can work with or without solar panels. He says a 7AC rooftop system would be able to cut a building’s cooling and heating bill by 50 percent if it runs off natural gas, and by 75 percent if it’s powered by solar.
“This could get you to a zero-energy building very easily,” said Vandermeulen, whose company plans to initially target one- to three-story commercial buildings.
Vandermeulen has been down the startup road in the Boston area before. In 2003, Vandermeulen founded semiconductor equipment firm BlueShift Technologies Inc. in Andover. The company would take in $26 million from investors including North Bridge Venture Partners of Waltham, Atlas Ventures of Cambridge and Intel Capital, the investment arm of Intel Corp.
But when the semiconductor equipment market fell off the charts amid the economic slowdown, investors shuttered the company in December 2009.
Even before the company folded, Vandermeulen had started on his new venture and won a fellowship from the New England Clean Energy Council. As part of the fellowship, he traveled to Colorado to view technology being developed at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. While he’d started out wanting to pioneer a more efficient solar panel, Vandermeulen said, he came away with an idea to instead pursue solar air conditioning.
Since then, he has licensed chiller technology from the national lab and started work on several inventions at 7AC with chief technology officer Jack Hanoka, who co-founded Marlborough-based Evergreen Solar Inc. in 1994 and served as its CTO until 2007. The 7AC technology uses a chilled salt solution to deliver cooling control through a unique membrane, Vandermeulen said.
The venture has stood out on the national cleantech startup scene, named as one of 18 finalists in the 2010 Cleantech Open competition. Vandermeulen impressed judges not only with a unique technology, but also with his hard-charging entrepreneurial approach, said Clark Waterfall, director of the Northeast competition.
“People measure early-stage companies as much by their founders as by their ideas,” Waterfall said. “Peter has passion, he’s hard-working, and he’s consistent. That’s hard to find all together.”
The company so far has won technology commercialization grants from the U.S. Department of Defense and Department of Energy, and plans to develop a prototype of its AC unit this year. With a Series B of $6 million to $8 million in 2012, Vandermeulen said, the company could have a commercial product ready by the end of that year or early 2013.
The market opportunity for the product is worth $1.6 billion, with 300,000 rooftop AC units replaced every year, Vandermeulen said.
Read more: Entrepreneur putting his energy behind the big chill | Boston Business Journal
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