Our Story
Enkara was created by combining decades of solar experience from The Conti Group with the advanced optical and materials innovations of Edgehog and TandemLaunch, forming a company dedicated to building the next generation of transparent solar technologies.
Origins in Utility Solar
Enkara’s story begins long before the company existed. In the 1990s, The Conti Group expanded its civil construction practice into utility‑scale solar, building Sundurance Energy, later Conti Solar and then CS Energy, into one of North America’s top solar EPC firms with more than one gigawatt of installed generation and hundreds of megawatts of battery storage. After the sale of CS Energy in 2018, Conti recognized that solar needed deeper innovation at the materials and technology level, not simply more EPC capacity. Meanwhile, TandemLaunch had founded Edgehog Advanced Technologies, a venture focused on breakthrough anti‑reflective optical coatings developed at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Around 2020, Conti began exploring how to re‑enter the solar market with a platform that fundamentally improved performance and economics. Drawing on decades of experience, the team identified a hundred opportunities to enhance utility‑scale solar and quickly found that while many solutions existed, a critical set of technologies had never been developed. This gap led to a deeper search across patents, research literature, and early‑stage science, revealing breakthroughs that were close to possible but not yet built.
The Conti Innovation Center
As Conti mapped the ways to meaningfully improve solar performance and long‑term economics, one insight became impossible to ignore: many of the most important innovations simply didn’t exist. While most of the needed components were available across the market or in emerging commercial form, a critical group of advancements could only be found buried in patents, uncommercialized academic research, or not at all. To pursue the remaining breakthroughs, Conti founded the Conti Innovation Center (CIC), creating a dedicated research and development effort to invent, engineer, and patent the technologies that would unlock a fundamentally better solar platform.
The Innovation Center launched with a clear mandate to develop the missing materials, processes, and device improvements that conventional solar had overlooked. The team built a laboratory, established collaborations with leading national labs, and began years of focused research and development in photovoltaic semiconductors, transparent conductors, optical coatings, and system‑level optimizations. This work produced a growing portfolio of proprietary technologies and global patents, laying the scientific foundation for what would become Enkara.
Edgehog Adavnced Technologies
While the Conti Innovation Center was advancing next‑generation photovoltaic materials, a parallel effort in Canada was rethinking the optics of anti-reflective coatings. Edgehog Advanced Technologies, launched through TandemLaunch, focused on creating advanced anti‑reflective coatings inspired by nanostructures found in nature. These coatings dramatically improved light transmission, reduced glare, and delivered optical performance far beyond traditional coated glass. Designed initially for solar and high‑end optics, Edgehog’s technology aligned perfectly with the needs of transparent photovoltaic devices developed by Conti. By the time Conti discovered the platform, Edgehog had already built a strong scientific foundation with exceptional potential for commercialization, offering capabilities that could significantly elevate the performance of next‑generation transparent solar materials.
The Merger and Enkara
As the Conti Innovation Center advanced its transparent photovoltaic materials, it became clear that pairing these breakthroughs with a cutting‑edge optical platform would dramatically improve both performance and commercial potential. Edgehog’s nanostructured anti‑reflective coatings offered exactly that capability, creating a natural and powerful alignment between the two organizations. In 2025, the Conti Innovation Center and Edgehog Advanced Technologies formally merged, combining years of research and development and scientific advancement.
The merger created Enkara, backed by the operational strength of The Conti Group, TandemLaunch’s experience in building deep‑tech ventures and supported by leading scientific partners at the National Laboratory of the Rockies (formerly NREL) and Brookhaven National Laboratory. Together, these resources formed a unified company with a clear mission: to develop transparent solar materials that redefine how energy is generated and integrated into buildings, systems, and everyday products.
