Industry Smart glass Website viewglass.com Type of business Private | Number of employees 500-750 Founded 2006 | |
Key people Dr. Rao Mulpuri (CEO)
Dr. Robert Robzicki (CTO)
James Fay (CFO)
Brian Harrison (COO) Products View Dynamic Glass, View Intelligence Headquarters Santa Rosa, California, United States Profiles | ||
View, previously Soladigm, makes dynamic glass systems based on electrochromism. View was founded in 2006 by Dr. Paul Nguyen as Chairman and President, an electrochromism expert from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who invented View's technology. View Dynamic Glass combined with View Intelligence intuitively tints to reduce incoming sunlight when occupants are experiencing excess glare or heat while maintaining the view. In December 2008, Founder and Chairman Nguyen hired Dr. Rao Mulpuri as CEO of the company. On November 12, 2012, Soladigm announced a name change to View, Inc. To date, the company has raised over $600 million dollars with an investment syndicate that includes TIAA, General Electric, Corning Glass, Seagate, Madrone Capital Partners, and the New Zealand SuperFund.
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Funding
After raising around $10.6M in Series A funding from Sigma Partners and Khosla Ventures, Founder and Chairman Nguyen focused on building up a team of experienced technologists and executives and developing its technology. In 2009, the company closed an additional $20.7M in Series B funding from its existing investors and moved its headquarters from Santa Rosa to Milpitas, California, USA. In late 2010, General Electric selected Soladigm to be a winner out of 3,800 contestants in 150 different countries in the Ecomagination Challenge. In 2011, the company raised at least $40M in Series C funding while receiving about $40M in loan from the State of Mississippi, USA to build its first manufacturing plant there. In June 2012, View announced that it had raised $55M in Series D Financing. In January 2015, View raised another $75M. In August 2015, Forbes reported that View raised $150 million from the New Zealand Superfund, Corning, Madrone Capital Partners (associated with the Walton family), together with several leading real estate players. View was valued at over $836 million in this latest round. On February 07, 2017 View, announced that it has secured $100M in investments, including a $50 million investment by TIAA Investments, an affiliate of $882 billion Nuveen. This investment provides growth capital and enables View to expand its manufacturing capacity and to scale operations in order to meet rapidly growing demand. With the latest investment, View's current valuation is well over $1 billion.
Products
View dynamic glass electrochromic (EC) coating has multiple layers with a thickness of 1 micron. View dynamic glass has been commercially available since 2012 producing and shipping IGU's up to 6' x 10'. View uses a scalable, modular architecture to connect the IGU's utilizing a simple trunk line, terminated wiring and can be reconfigured remotely. View Intelligence is driven by a cloud connected, real time monitoring and management system to enable remote diagnosis and recovery and remote customization (eg re-zoning). As of February 2017, View Dynamic Glass has been installed in over 300 building structures across North America, with an additional 150+ underway in various commercial markets including corporate offices, healthcare, government, higher education and hospitality.
Competitors
View's main competitors include SAGE Electrochromics, which was acquired in 2012 by Saint-Gobain, one of the largest glass companies in the world, in the USA and EControl-Glas in Europe. Since 2010, Applied Materials started to explore electrochomic smart glass as a new business opportunity, leveraging its expertise in thin film deposition and manufacturing technologies.