space-solar
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Saurav Shroff
Saurav Shroff is the co-founder and CEO of Starpath, a Hawthorne, California startup building industrial-scale infrastructure to mine and refine rocket propellant on the Moon and Mars. A UC Berkeley engineering grad and former SpaceX avionics engineer, he started Starpath in mid-2022 with the conviction that mining lunar water ice into liquid oxygen could cut the cost of deep-space transport by orders of magnitude. Starpath raised a $12M seed round in 2024, won NASA Break the Ice prize money, and in 2025 launched 'Starlight' space-rated solar panels priced roughly 90% below industry norms. Shroff has testified before Congress on space resource mining and frames his ambition bluntly: build the supply chain for a million-person city on Mars.
Joel Jean
Joel Jean is Co-Founder and CEO of Swift Solar, the San Carlos, California-based company turning a decade of perovskite research into commercial solar panels that generate up to 30% more power than conventional silicon. A Taiwanese-American from Beavercreek, Ohio who went through Stanford (BS EE, with distinction) and MIT (SM and PhD EE, NSF Graduate Research Fellow), Jean co-authored the landmark MIT Future of Solar Energy study in 2015, then realized the only logical next step was to build the company the study described. Swift Solar, founded in 2017 with five other perovskite PhDs drawn from MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, and NREL, has raised over $60M, deployed its panels in a live US Department of Defense exercise, earned TIME Top GreenTech recognition three consecutive years, and in March 2026 acquired Meyer Burger's HJT manufacturing assets to plant a full US solar supply chain.
Margo Naray
Margo de Naray is the Chief Executive Officer of Solestial, Inc., a Tempe, Arizona-based space solar power startup pioneering radiation-hardened, ultrathin silicon solar cells that self-cure radiation damage at low operating temperatures. Appointed CEO in May 2025 following the company's $17M Series A funding round, she brings 20 years of cross-industry leadership spanning aerospace (Astra Space), agribusiness (Cargill), and semiconductor manufacturing (Intel). Solestial's technology promises to slash the cost of spacecraft solar arrays by roughly 90% compared to incumbent III-V multijunction technology, using automated manufacturing and widely available silicon to make reliable space-grade solar power accessible at scale.