A single shaded panel can drag down a whole row of solar panels, and SolarEdge built a business on fixing that. The Israeli company put a small power optimizer on each panel and paired it with its own inverter and a cloud monitoring service. By early 2015 it had shipped about 1.3 gigawatts of systems to 73 countries. Rooftop solar was booming in America, and SolarEdge wanted to ride it to Nasdaq.

Five Founders in Herzliya

SolarEdge was founded in 2006 in Israel and began shipping in 2010. Older solar systems linked panels in long strings, so the weakest panel set the pace for the rest. Microinverters fixed part of that problem, at a cost. SolarEdge split the job. Optimizers on each panel tuned the power, and one central inverter turned it into household current. The bet was that this design would beat both rivals on price, safety and monitoring.

Eighteen Dollars in the Sun

SolarEdge priced at $18 a share in March 2015 and listed on Nasdaq as SEDG. Over the next several years it became one of the largest inverter makers in the world and moved into batteries and electric-vehicle parts. Co-founder and chief executive Guy Sella died in 2019. When high interest rates slowed rooftop solar in 2023, SolarEdge's sales fell hard. It is still public on Nasdaq.

Cover: Sunrise on New Year's Day at Susaki (Susaki hatsu hinode no zu), from the series "Famous Places in the Eastern Capital (Toto meisho)", Utagawa Kuniyoshi. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for the sun rising over the sea (solar power).