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About

Our Story

Some problems are accepted. Others get solved.

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Dead batteries grounding fleets before dawn. Liftgates that won't cycle. Vessels losing auxiliary power in open water. Remote assets going dark miles from the nearest service call. For decades, these failures were written off as the cost of operating in hard environments - not engineering problems, just operational reality. The industry moved on. Our engineers didn't. We kept a running list.

Merlin was built on a different conviction: those failures were problems worth solving. 

So we got to work. We deployed across every condition we could find, brutal cold, desert heat, open ocean, constant vibration, ballistic impact, and we measured everything. Traditional panels weren't built for those environments. We engineered a different kind of solar: lightweight, flexible, rugged silicon modules designed to survive real-world operations.  

Then we proved it. 

Billions of road miles. Millions of nautical miles. Hundreds of thousands of tractors and trailers. Military operations across the globe. We gathered data until we didn't just know our technology worked, we knew exactly why and exactly where. That validation made us the first to integrate solar energy systems on commercial vehicles at scale, carried us onto unmanned ocean vessels, pulled generators off remote job sites, and brought dependable power to places traditional energy infrastructure was never designed to reach. 

And each challenge pushes us to expand the boundaries.


Every environment once considered beyond reach becomes a problem worth solving. That progression is proof of a single engineering idea applied further each time, that any surface, on any asset, in any environment, is a candidate for energy generation. That curiosity is what built Merlin and what still drives us. What we've developed over years of real-world deployments on the most demanding platforms on earth is the technology, the data, and the engineering partnership to finish what others have stopped trying. 

When you stop accepting the limits of where power can exist, you don't just solve problems, you change what's possible.

Our Leadership

The founders have a combined expertise of over 200 years in semiconductors, solar, photonics, flexible displays, and high throughput automation.
 
This combination of expertise has resulted in a portfolio of 50+ international patents and delivered products that are acknowledged to be the best-in-class.

Chief Executive Officer

Kendall Combs

Chief Financial Officer

Ian VanReepinghen

CTO, Founder, & President

Venkatesan Murali

Chief Product Officer, Co-Founder

Bob Brainard

Our Guiding Principles

Values

We aim to excel in execution, delight customers with integrity, drive innovation and strategy, and empower our team.

Vision

We foster a cleaner environment for future generations by creating innovative and sustainable solar solutions. 

Mission

To become the dominant solar provider in transportation, roofing, and portables. 

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