Brice Cruchon is the Founder and CEO of Dracula Technologies, a company he established in 2011 to develop and industrialize organic photovoltaic (OPV) technologies for indoor energy harvesting. He holds a Master’s degree in Chemistry from the University of Nantes (France) and has built a career spanning chemistry, intellectual property, innovation management, and technology commercialization.
With more than 28 years of executive leadership experience, Brice has extensive expertise in innovation strategy, intellectual property, technology financing, and industrial scale-up. Under his leadership, Dracula Technologies has evolved from a deep-tech startup into an industrial company, marked by the launch of its first manufacturing facility in Valence, France. Today, he is leading the company’s international expansion with the vision of making light energy harvesting a mainstream power source for ultra-low-power electronics and enabling the widespread adoption of battery-free IoT devices.
Tell us about your company?
When we founded Dracula Technologies, we were convinced that billions of connected devices could not continue to rely on disposable batteries. At the time, indoor energy harvesting was still considered a niche technology. Today, the conversation has shifted. As IoT deployments scale and sustainability becomes a priority, customers are looking for practical alternatives. That’s exactly where we bring value.
Dracula Technologies specializes in organic energy harvesting solutions for the global IoT market. We are best known for our LAYER® organic photovoltaic (OPV) technology, which harvests energy from ambient indoor light to power connected devices without disposable batteries.
LAYER® is specifically designed to operate under low and variable indoor lighting conditions, making it well suited for autonomous IoT devices. We also introduced LAYER® Vault, an integrated energy harvesting solution that combines our OPV technology with energy storage. It simplifies system design, reduces development complexity and helps OEMs accelerate time to market for autonomous connected devices.
Over the past decade, we have developed expertise in organic materials, device architecture, additive manufacturing and proprietary digital printing processes. Those capabilities have enabled us to move from laboratory innovation to industrial production. Today, our Green Micropower Factory in Valence, France, is the world’s largest facility dedicated exclusively to the production of organic photovoltaic modules using our patented digital printing process. This enables us to deliver high-volume, customized solutions while continuing to scale with customer demand.
What problems are you solving?
The first challenge we address is battery dependence in connected devices. As billions of IoT sensors are deployed worldwide, replacing and maintaining batteries becomes increasingly costly, labor intensive and environmentally challenging.
The semiconductor industry has made tremendous progress in reducing power consumption. As devices become more energy efficient, energy harvesting becomes an increasingly practical way to power them.
Our technology enables manufacturers to harvest energy from indoor light, reducing or even eliminating the need for disposable batteries in many applications. This helps lower maintenance costs, improve device autonomy, support sustainability goals and ensure continuous data transmission.
Replacing one battery is easy. Replacing thousands or even millions of batteries quickly becomes a significant operational and financial challenge. Customers are looking for ways to improve reliability while reducing maintenance and operating costs.
Our objective isn’t simply to replace batteries. It’s to make energy harvesting a practical power source for the next generation of connected electronics.
More broadly, we also see opportunities to address manufacturing challenges across the electronics industry. Companies are looking for more sustainable, scalable and resource-efficient production approaches. Our expertise in organic materials and additive manufacturing opens the door to new possibilities in organic electronics, including OLED and other future applications.
What application areas are your strongest?
Our technology has evolved well beyond powering individual sensors. Today, our strongest application areas are smart buildings and intelligent infrastructure, smart labels and asset tracking, smart retail, connected devices and industrial IoT.
Smart buildings are one of our fastest-growing markets. Together with partners such as Schneider Electric and Orioma, we have developed ambient light-powered solutions ranging from smart thermostats to intelligent occupancy and environmental sensors. These solutions help simplify installation, reduce wiring and maintenance, and enable smarter, more energy-efficient buildings.
Another major focus is smart labels, asset tracking and logistics. Working with partners including Linxens, Paragon ID, MOKOSmart and truvami, we have developed ambient light-powered RFID and Bluetooth® Low Energy tracking solutions for retail, warehouses, factories and supply chain applications. These solutions provide real-time tracking, environmental monitoring and asset visibility while significantly reducing battery maintenance.
We are also seeing strong momentum in smart retail. Our collaboration with CoolR demonstrates how ambient light energy harvesting can power connected retail monitoring solutions operating in refrigerated and other challenging indoor environments where battery replacement is particularly costly.
Connected devices represent another important area of growth. Our collaboration with Atmosic Technologies demonstrates how ambient light energy harvesting can enable battery-free remote controls and other ultra-low-power connected devices designed for long operational lifetimes with minimal maintenance.
Beyond these application-specific collaborations, we continue to work closely with technology ecosystem partners including STMicroelectronics, e-peas, and Semtech to help OEMs accelerate the development of battery-free and battery-assisted connected devices. We are also collaborating with Powercast on battery-free Bluetooth® Low Energy sensor nodes that combine RF wireless power with our LAYER® organic photovoltaic technology. By combining complementary energy harvesting technologies, these solutions can support more reliable operation in environments where available energy sources vary.
One thing we’ve learned is that there isn’t a single killer application. Every year we discover new use cases where eliminating battery maintenance creates real value for customers. What all these applications have in common is the need for reliable, maintenance-free operation over many years.
What keeps your customers up at night?
For many of our customers, the challenge is not the sensor itself. It is how to power and maintain large deployments over many years.
Replacing one battery is easy. Replacing thousands or even millions of batteries quickly becomes a significant operational and financial challenge. Customers are looking for ways to improve reliability while reducing maintenance and operating costs.
Sustainability is another important consideration. Manufacturers are under pressure to reduce waste, improve resource efficiency and meet increasingly ambitious environmental goals. Eliminating disposable batteries wherever possible is one way to address those challenges.
Across the electronics industry, companies are also looking at how future manufacturing technologies can improve both performance and sustainability. We believe organic electronics will play an important role in that evolution.
What does the competitive landscape look like and how do you differentiate?
The energy harvesting market includes several technologies, each suited to different operating environments. Our focus is on harvesting low levels of ambient indoor light efficiently and at industrial scale.
Indoor environments present unique challenges. Light levels are much lower than outdoors and vary depending on the application. Maximizing energy generation under these conditions requires materials and device architectures specifically designed for indoor illumination. We have spent more than a decade continuously improving the efficiency of our organic photovoltaic technology for these environments. Our latest generation can generate usable energy from light levels as low as 5 lux, allowing us to address applications operating in extremely low indoor illumination.
Performance is important, but performance alone isn’t enough. Customers also want technologies they can manufacture, integrate and deploy reliably at scale. That’s where we’ve invested a great deal of effort over the past decade.
Many organizations develop innovative materials in the laboratory. We have developed both the technology and the manufacturing capability to produce organic photovoltaic modules in volume using our proprietary digital printing process.
Moving from innovative materials to repeatable, high-volume manufacturing is one of the biggest challenges in organic electronics. We believe our ability to bridge that gap is one of our greatest strengths.
Finally, the knowledge we have developed in organic materials, printing processes and device manufacturing extends beyond OPV and creates opportunities to explore adjacent organic electronics applications.
What new features and technologies are you working on?
Innovation has always been central to our strategy, but our roadmap is largely driven by our customers. They continually challenge us to improve performance, reduce footprint and make our technology even easier to integrate into their products.
Most recently, we introduced a new generation of our OPV technology. It delivers a 30 percent increase in overall performance while improving operation under indoor LED lighting. It also incorporates advances in our proprietary organic photovoltaic materials and gives designers greater flexibility to optimize size and power according to their application requirements.
Innovation is not only about improving efficiency. It’s also about building long-term technology leadership. Today, our innovation is supported by a portfolio of 30 patents across nine internationally recognized patent families covering organic materials, photovoltaic device architecture and manufacturing processes. This intellectual property gives us a strong foundation to continue advancing our core OPV technology while exploring new opportunities in organic electronics.
Innovation is also about making our technology easier to integrate and faster to deploy. Our goal is to reduce complexity for OEMs so they can bring new products to market more quickly.
While OPV remains our core business, it is only one application of a broader technology platform. The expertise we have developed creates opportunities across a broader range of organic electronics applications. That’s why we recently announced that we are exploring the potential of applying this expertise to OLED technology.
Our ambition is to make organic electronics a practical technology for large-scale commercial applications.
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