Solar energy is clean and renewable, but only provides 4% of the world's electricity. Reducing costs by increasing the efficiency and lifetime of solar panels can enable wider solar adoption, but solar panel efficiencies have improved little in recent years and are expected to increase only slightly over the next only slightly over the next decade (from 21% to 22.5%). Heliotrope Photonics is an initiative developed by two NYU graduate students that aims to advance solar manufacturing and improve the performance of solar panels to make solar energy more affordable. Technology: The team has developed and patented a coating technology that converts sunlight to power solar panels. Our solution is a perovskite thin film coated on solar glass that converts ultraviolet light to near-infrared light. This innovation results in a remarkable 8-15% increase in power output, equivalent to a decade of industry progress. The most important feature of our solution is that we are modifying the solar spectrum, not the underlying solar cells, so the technology can take advantage of existing solar manufacturing.