Dracula Technologies Raises €30 Million for Battery-Free IoT

• Dracula Technologies raises €30M to turbocharge OPV production, powering battery-free IoT at scale; quadrupling output to meet surging demand for sustainable sensors, trackers and low-maintenance energy harvesting.

France-based Dracula Technologies raised EUR 30 million (USD 34.9 million) in a Series A to scale production of its organic photovoltaic (OPV) modules for battery-free Internet of Things devices. The financing will be used to expand manufacturing capacity and accelerate commercialization as the company moves to meet rising demand for low-power energy harvesting solutions at scale across industries.

Dracula plans to quadruple output of its OPV components, which power small electronic devices without batteries, positioning the firm to supply makers of sensors, trackers and other connected products seeking lower maintenance and sustainable power options. The company targets batteryless IoT deployments.

How will Dracula Technologies' €30M boost OPV scale for batteryless IoT markets?

• Fund production scale-up: add automated roll-to-roll printing lines, inline quality control, and yield-optimization to multiply annual OPV output and cut unit cost per square centimeter.
  
• Secure materials chain: long-term contracts for conductive inks and photoactive polymers, dual-sourcing of substrates, and in-house ink formulation to stabilize pricing and reduce lead times.
  
• Productization for IoT: standardized OPV tile sizes, flexible form factors, and ultra-low-illumination performance tuned for 50–500 lux indoor environments common in buildings and warehouses.
  
• Power electronics co-design: partnerships with PMIC vendors to integrate micro-watt MPPT, energy buffers, and cold-start circuitry, delivering reference designs that drop into BLE, Zigbee, and LoRa nodes.
  
• Certification and reliability: budget for IEC/UL testing, indoor lifetime validation (humidity/thermal cycling), and recyclability documentation to ease enterprise procurement.
  
• Manufacturing footprint: expand from pilot to semi-gigawatt-hour-equivalent area output, with regional assembly to serve EU and North American EMS partners and reduce logistics emissions.
  
• Go-to-market acceleration: design-win programs with sensor OEMs, logistics tag makers, and building-management vendors; developer kits and APIs for power-aware firmware.
  
• Vertical focus: smart buildings (occupancy, air quality), asset tracking (RTLS beacons), industrial condition monitoring, agri-sensing in greenhouses, and medical disposables where battery swaps are impractical.
  
• Economics versus coin cells: lower total cost of ownership by eliminating battery replacement labor, hazardous waste handling, and downtime; predictable multi-year indoor energy harvesting.
  
• Ecosystem alliances: alignment with EnOcean/Thread/BLE ecosystems, packaging OPV with ultra-low-power MCUs and radios to ship turnkey “energy-autonomous” modules.
  
• IP and defensibility: expand patents on printed OPV architectures and encapsulation; potential licensing to contract manufacturers for faster regional scaling.
  
• Workforce growth: hire process engineers, materials scientists, and field-app teams to shorten design-in cycles and support high-volume customers.
  
• Sustainability edge: lifecycle assessments and take-back programs that help enterprise buyers meet Scope 3 targets and regulatory bans on primary cells in certain applications.
• Risk mitigation: redundancy in suppliers, accelerated burn-in to weed out early failures, and firmware power budgets to ensure headroom under variable light conditions.
  
• Timeline and milestones: move from current capacity to 4x output within 12–18 months, lock first multi-million-unit commitments, and launch second-gen modules optimized for ultra-low lux retail and healthcare settings.