Most of India’s rooftops will never hold a solar panel. They are too small, too weak, too crowded, or simply the wrong shape — and the panels themselves are heavy slabs of glass and silicon that need steel frames, drilling and a roof strong enough to carry them. So the country’s solar boom has mostly belonged to open fields and big industrial roofs, while the walls and windows of its cities sat in the sun doing nothing. Pavakah Energy, a startup incubated at IIT Hyderabad, thinks that is a waste of a perfectly good surface.
The company prints solar panels the way you print a poster. Its thin film — a translucent sheet with alternating gold and dark stripes that can be folded and rolled like a postcard — is made by printing nanoparticle inks onto glass or plastic, layer by layer, until a working solar cell emerges. The film is thinner than a strand of hair, the finished panel only a few millimetres thick, and the whole thing weighs less than a kilogram per square metre, against six or seven for a conventional thin-film silicon wafer. Because it is light and flexible, it can go where rigid panels cannot: vertical walls, slanted roofs, windows, facades, and structures that could never bear a framed panel’s weight. No drilling, no mounting, no major modifications. In effect, it is paint that makes electricity — a film that applies more like wallpaper.
The idea began in 2022, when Vikram Bakaraju and Kapardhi Bharadwaj founded Pavakah Energy at IIT Hyderabad. Bakaraju, the chief executive, leads product development and research with twelve years in experimental physics and optoelectronics and a master’s degree in nanoscience from Swansea University. Bharadwaj, the chief operating officer, brings thirteen years in energy and public policy and an MBA in energy management. The name comes from pāvaka, Sanskrit for solar flare. Their research facility began in a makeshift shed on campus and now sits inside a Class 1000 clean room at iTIC, IIT Hyderabad’s deep-tech incubator, where a team spanning chemistry, physics and engineering synthesises inks, prints films and fabricates cells. Dr Nagabhushan Patel heads research and development, and Dr Ashish Kulkarni of IIT Hyderabad’s chemistry department advises the team.
What makes the film more than a novelty is that it does two jobs at once. It generates electricity from incident light while reflecting ultraviolet and infrared radiation, so the surface it covers stays cooler — indoor temperatures three to five degrees Celsius below outdoor levels, the company says. The materials are deliberately ordinary: perovskite nanocrystals carry the light-harvesting work, alongside titanium dioxide, the stuff of cosmetics and food packaging, and PEDOT:PSS, a conductive polymer found in OLED and LED screens. There are no rare-earth dependencies anywhere in the stack. The films are produced with inkjet and screen printing in normal environmental conditions, which keeps both production costs and energy use low, and the film can be peeled from its substrate at the end of its life so its materials can be recovered — recyclability designed in from the start, not bolted on afterwards. The company describes the film as patented technology, built for high-cooling-load environments like India’s.
The numbers are moving fast. The company said in late 2025 that its film converts around 7% of the sunlight hitting it, and it is targeting 10% by the end of the year, 20% within twelve months and 25% within twenty-four — the range where conventional silicon panels sit, at 20 to 24%. Around the film, Pavakah has built a custom solar charge controller that plugs into standard solar inverters, and a simulation tool the company calls BAEM, the Built Area Energy Model, which maps a building’s surfaces by sunlight and heat so the film goes exactly where it will harvest the most.
The business is built for buildings first. Pavakah manufactures the film and works through engineering, procurement and construction partners who handle installation, starting with pilot projects run directly with customers. For each building, the company first maps its total energy potential, shadow patterns, thermal behaviour and energy demand, then designs the system with a choice of colours and facades to suit it. Its first targets are commercial buildings, office complexes and warehouses, especially those chasing green certifications. The startup has raised Rs 1.62 crore in pre-seed funding from Aar Em Ventures, US-based Wilbe Capital, Dholakia Ventures and the Startup India Seed Fund, joined the Brigade REAP accelerator, and is running a commercial pilot with Brigade Group at the World Trade Centre in Bengaluru. In 2025, YourStory named it to the Tech30, its annual list of India’s thirty most promising startups.
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The road ahead runs through the surfaces solar has never reached. Pavakah is working on building-integrated and vehicle-integrated photovoltaics, including films for medium and large trucks to power their on-board electrical systems, and on photon rechargeable batteries that store energy directly from sunlight, bypassing the grid — still in research. Beyond India, the company plans to take its films to South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa. India is already the world’s third-largest producer of solar power, almost all of it from large solar farms. Pavakah’s bet is that the next share of that power will come from the walls, windows and rooftops that are already standing in the sun.
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