View, Inc.

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View, Inc. is an American glass systems manufacturer headquartered in Milpitas, California. It makes and sells smart glass systems based on electrochromism.

Video View, Inc.

History

Founding

The company was founded as eChromics by Paul Nguyen in Santa Rosa, California in April 2007 to develop smart glass using electrochromism. The company raised a Series A round of funding from Sigma Partners and Khosla Ventures shortly after its founding, and Sigma and Khosla took over control of the company and received preferred shares. The company was renamed to "Soladigm" in October 2007. In December 2008, the company appointed Rao Mulpuri as CEO. Soladigm moved its headquarters to Milpitas, California after reconditioning a Seagate Technology factory. In January 2009 Nguyen was removed as CTO and was fired the next month.

Litigation

The company took a series of other actions against Nguyen's interests, which led Nguyen to file suit in January 2010. The parties agreed to arbitration, and in December 2015, the arbitrator ruled in Nguyen's favor, As of June 2017 additional litigation was still underway due to Nguyen's challenge to further actions taken by the company to restructure the company and its board.

Technology development

Electrochromic technology has been discussed at least since the 1964 New York World's Fair but it took until the 1990s for any company to sell the first products using it.

Move to Milpitas

In 2009 the company learned about a factory in Milpitas owned by Seagate that had sputter deposition equipment in it, which Seagate was intending to junk; the company under Mulpuri's leadership acquired it and hired many of the employees who had worked for Seagate.

The company's technology involves depositing five layers of metal oxide and two conductor layers that are altogether 1 micron thick on a piece of glass, and laying another piece of glass on top; and applying small voltage changes in the conducting layers which change the color in the metal layers. View Dynamic Glass also blocks 99% of UV light.

The company had licensed intellectual property related to using this approach in large panels from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The company used the sputtering equipment to perfect the technique and to try to make it cost efficient.

Olive Branch Factory and GE Prize

In August 2010 the company said it would build a factory in Olive Branch, Mississippi, near Memphis. In late 2010, General Electric selected Soladigm to be a winner out of 3,800 contestants in 150 different countries in the Ecomagination Challenge.

Soladigm becomes View, Inc.

In February 2011 the company announced that it intended to start shipping its product out of the Mississippi factory in the first quarter of 2012. Soladigm changed its name to View, Inc. in November 2012 when it emerged from semi-stealth mode. View, Inc. began shipping to customers from its new factory in Olive Branch near the end of the third quarter of 2012.

Maps View, Inc.

Business

Building owners purchase dynamic glass systems primarily to save money on heating and cooling, and also to be able to avoid using shades, which block the view. The company makes panels that can be retrofitted as well as panels based on builders' specifications. The tint of the glass can be controlled manually, through an app, and can also be controlled through a centralized software system that can change tint in response to weather or interior temperature. As of June 2017 the company said that its product was installed in about 350 buildings, with about 150 in process, totaling about 20 million square feet of buildings.

As of June 2017, View raised $700 million in funding. It has 600 employees, with about one-third of them based in Milpitas.

According to a study conducted in May 2017 by the University of Washington's Integrated Design Lab, View Dynamic Glass saved one building in Seattle 17.7% in energy usage, worth about $28,000, or 351,604 kilowatt hours.

One of the company's main competitors is Minnesota-based SAGE Electrochromics, which was acquired by the French company Saint-Gobain in 2012. In December 2012 Sage filed a patent infringement suit against View; View counter-sued a few months later.