Epishine AB, headquartered in Linköping, Sweden, is an energy technology company specializing in printed organic solar cells designed to harvest energy from low-light indoor environments.
Unlike conventional solar panels that rely on direct sunlight, Epishine's technology efficiently converts ambient indoor light—such as office, retail, and household lighting—into electrical power. The company's lightweight, flexible solar cells are intended for integration into low-power electronic devices, including Internet of Things（IoT） sensors, remote controls, and electronic shelf labels.
By reducing dependence on disposable batteries and power cables, Epishine's solutions help lower maintenance costs while minimizing environmental impact. This makes them particularly well suited for the rapidly expanding IoT, where millions of connected devices require reliable and sustainable power sources.
A key competitive advantage lies in the company's roll-to-roll manufacturing process, which enables high-volume, cost-effective production of printed organic solar cells. This scalable production technology supports the widespread adoption of self-powered IoT devices and contributes to the transition toward more sustainable electronic systems.
As demand for maintenance-free connected devices continues to grow, Epishine is positioning itself at the forefront of indoor light energy harvesting, offering innovative solutions that combine energy efficiency, scalability, and environmental sustainability.
We sat down with Mattias Josephson, CEO of the energy impact company to talk over how Epishine's product can meet the evolving AI needs, its business plan and its human capital and sustainability initiatives.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming industries worldwide, but its future extends well beyond software. Increasingly, AI is becoming embedded in the physical world through billions of connected devices that monitor environments, collect data, and make autonomous decisions. Smart buildings, hospitals, warehouses, factories, and retail stores are all becoming populated with intelligent sensors that operate continuously in the background.
While enormous attention has been paid to advances in computing power, machine learning, and cloud infrastructure, a much more fundamental challenge remains unresolved: how to power the growing number of connected devices economically and sustainably.
Swedish technology company Epishine believes the answer lies not in developing better batteries, but in reducing dependence on disposable batteries and routine battery replacement. By harvesting energy from ordinary indoor light, the company aims to enable electronic devices to operate with greater energy autonomy throughout their service life, addressing one of the most persistent maintenance challenges facing the Internet of Things (IoT).
Epishine develops and manufactures printed indoor solar cells specifically designed for low-power electronic devices. Unlike conventional solar panels that generate electricity from direct sunlight, the company's technology efficiently converts ambient indoor lighting into usable electrical energy.
The technology is intended for products such as wireless sensors, electronic shelf labels, smart building systems, and asset tracking devices. These applications consume relatively little power but are often deployed in large numbers. Replacing disposable batteries across thousands—or even millions—of devices creates significant labor costs, operational disruption, and environmental waste.
According to the company, the rapid expansion of connected electronics means battery replacement is becoming one of the industry's least scalable practices. Even as processors become more powerful and communication networks faster, maintenance remains largely unchanged from decades ago, with technicians manually replacing batteries one device at a time.
Epishine's vision is to remove this maintenance burden by allowing devices to harvest the light energy already available in their surroundings. The company has moved decisively beyond the laboratory and into industrial production. Its technology is already integrated into commercial products, while Epishine is working with some of the world's leading technology companies to bring energy-autonomous electronics to global, high-volume markets.
The company has undergone an important shift in how it defines its business.
Rather than viewing itself simply as a producer of indoor solar cells, Epishine increasingly describes its role as building the energy infrastructure for autonomous electronics. This reflects a broader understanding that reliable energy harvesting will become an essential component of future intelligent systems.
One distinguishing characteristic of Epishine is its control over the design and manufacturing process for its indoor photovoltaic modules, from module architecture and materials optimization to process engineering and roll-to-roll production at its facilities in Sweden.
This integrated approach allows the company to maintain strict quality control while ensuring that manufacturing processes can be scaled efficiently for commercial applications.
Organic electronics has benefited from more than three decades of research conducted by universities, research institutes, and industrial organizations worldwide. Epishine acknowledges that its scientific foundation is built upon this broader international research community.
However, the company's competitive advantage does not primarily stem from basic scientific discovery. Instead, it lies in industrialization.
Transforming laboratory research into reliable, high-volume manufacturing is often far more challenging than inventing the original technology. Small variations in production conditions can significantly influence product performance, manufacturing yield, long-term reliability, and production costs.
For more than a decade, Epishine has concentrated on understanding these interactions and refining every stage of its manufacturing process.
Rather than developing every raw material internally, Epishine focuses on optimizing indoor photovoltaic module architecture and manufacturing using commercially available materials. Its intellectual property and more than a decade of accumulated process know-how enable consistent industrial production and create significant barriers to replication.
Although advanced manufacturing often emphasizes equipment and automation, Epishine argues that industrial capability ultimately depends on people.
The company considers its greatest asset to be the accumulated expertise of its employees rather than any individual machine or patent. It’s team spans 17 nationalities and includes seven PhDs, bringing together expertise in chemistry, materials science, process engineering, electronics, manufacturing, and commercial development.
This diversity is viewed as essential because many engineering challenges require multiple technical perspectives.
Epishine also emphasizes cross-functional collaboration throughout the organization. Engineers, scientists, production specialists, and commercial teams are encouraged to work together from the earliest stages of product development instead of operating within isolated departments.
Equally important is the company's philosophy that decision-making authority should remain close to technical knowledge. Employees with the deepest understanding of a problem are generally given responsibility for solving it, helping preserve innovation while supporting organizational growth.
For Epishine, artificial intelligence (AI) plays two distinct roles: it is a market driver as intelligence moves into more physical devices, and an internal tool for improving productivity.
Internally, the company sees AI as a way to augment rather than replace specialized expertise—for example by accelerating analysis of research and production data, supporting quality documentation, and making accumulated technical knowledge easier to use.
These improvements allow experienced engineers to devote more attention to complex technical challenges that continue to require human judgment.
As industrial AI adoption accelerates, Epishine also stresses the importance of responsible implementation. Product quality, traceability, regulatory compliance, and customer trust remain dependent on human accountability.
Epishine approaches sustainability from a practical business perspective.
According to the company, customers rarely purchase products solely because they are environmentally friendly. Instead, they invest in technologies that reduce operating costs, minimize maintenance, improve reliability, and lower the total cost of ownership.
When better engineering simultaneously reduces environmental impact, sustainability becomes a natural business outcome.
Indoor solar technology exemplifies this philosophy. By eliminating or substantially reducing routine battery replacement across large fleets of connected devices, organizations can lower maintenance costs while decreasing electronic waste and extending equipment lifetimes.
The company also places emphasis on responsible material selection, efficient manufacturing processes, and designing products for long-term durability.
What is changing now is the convergence of ultra-low-power electronics, wireless connectivity, edge AI, compact energy storage, and ambient energy harvesting. Together, these technologies can enable devices to sense, communicate, and make decisions for years without wired power or routine battery replacement.
Different applications may utilize different energy sources—such as light, heat, motion, or radio-frequency energy—depending on their operating environments. However, for many indoor IoT applications, ambient light represents one of the most practical and widely available sources of renewable energy.
As edge AI continues to expand and billions of additional connected devices enter service, demand for autonomous power solutions is expected to increase alongside computational capabilities.
Epishine aims to position itself at the center of this transformation by making indoor photovoltaic technology simple to integrate, commercially scalable, and economically viable.
Ultimately, the company's ambition extends beyond manufacturing indoor solar cells. It seeks to establish a future in which self-powered electronics become the industry standard. If that vision is realized, users may no longer think about batteries at all. Instead, they will simply expect connected devices to work—autonomously, for years, powered by the light already around them.
Original source: The Europe Times