With a new infusion of capital, renewable-energy manufacturer Caelux Corp. has opened an additional facility in Baldwin Park. The Pasadena-based company recently closed $12 million of investment in a series A funding round led by Temasek Holding Ltd., bringing its total funding to $24 million. Caelux was founded in 2014 as a spinoff of the California Institute of Technology and works with perovskite, a crystalline material.

The company makes perovskite-coated photovoltaic glass to be used in solar panel manufacturing, and Chief Executive Scott Graybeal said that the new Baldwin Park facility will be producing more than 500,000 square meters of the glass by the end of next year. Caelux had been operating in stealth mode until September as it worked on research and development, and company officials said that it has strategic supply arrangements with “a handful” of manufacturers in place, pending product qualification.

“Typically, in the solar industry, you fight tooth and nail to get maybe a 5% improvement in the performance,” Graybeal said. “We’re talking about between 20% and 30% improvement in performance, so this is a really significant step-function change in the power output of solar modules.”

Its flagship product, Caelux One, will launch in the fourth quarter of next year and, once qualified, the company expects the product will be sold out for the first 18 months of production. 

The company previously announced a strategic partnership with solar-module manufacturers REC Group and Reliance Industries Ltd., the latter of which has purchased a 20% stake in the company for $12 million and said that it plans to produce “more powerful and lower-cost” solar panels with Caelux’s products.

“The first consumers of our product are going to be module companies that will make residential solar modules,” Graybeal said. “This technology has been in development for about 15 years globally with a number of different research institutes, and we’re one of the first companies to really push forward and commercialize this.”

Perovskite solar cells have shown potential for “high performance and low production costs,” according to the Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Office. Caelux’s products will combine perovskite with crystalline silicon, which is a standard material in solar panel production. 

The Department of Energy said the two materials make “excellent hybrid-tandem partners” in solar power production, as perovskite can take advantage of parts of the solar spectrum more efficiently than silicon materials. 

Caelux will remain headquartered in Pasadena. With its new funding, Graybeal said the company plans to grow its team to over 60 employees, up from its current headcount of 39, by the end of the year.