Trades on the OTC market; agreed to be acquired by Zeo Energy in 2024
The rise & fall
7 moments · 2013–2024
The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.
2013
🌱
2013
Founded at Idealab
Bill Gross's concentrated-solar startup: fields of AI-steered mirrors focusing sunlight into extreme industrial heat.
Wikipedia
Nov 2019
Nov 2019
Out of stealth with a Bill Gates halo
Announces mirror-field temperatures hot enough for industrial processes, with Gates among the backers.
CNBC
Dec 2021
📈
Dec 2021
The peak: a ~$2B SPAC listing$2B
Merges with Athena Technology Acquisition Corp and hits the NYSE at the crest of the cleantech-SPAC wave.
Reuters
2022–23
2022–23
Commercialization stalls
The technology is slow to leave the test field, and the stock begins a roughly 99% slide.
Reuters
2022
💔
2022
Slips out of the club
Less than a year after listing, the market cap is under $1B.
Macrotrends
2022–24
💬
From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2022–24
Glassdoor reviews from the slide described constant strategy churn — engineers said the company kept switching between receiver technologies without shipping a finished product — and traced repeated layoffs and leadership turnover after the founder's exit to eroding focus and morale.
2024
2024
Zeo Energy absorbs what's left
After the ~99% collapse pushed the shares onto the OTC market at a roughly $15M micro-cap, Heliogen agrees to merge with Zeo Energy at a tiny valuation.
Reuters
💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.
How it happened
Heliogen was a Bill Gates-backed cleantech startup using fields of AI-controlled mirrors to concentrate sunlight to extreme temperatures for industrial heat and green hydrogen. It went public on the NYSE in late 2021 via a roughly $2B SPAC merger, but its technology was slow to commercialize and the stock collapsed about 99% onto the OTC market before Zeo Energy absorbed it in 2024.
Source: Reuters / BizTimes / stockanalysis (Bill Gates-backed concentrated-solar-power startup; went public via a ~$2B SPAC merger with Athena Technology Acquisition Corp in late 2021; technology and commercialization stalled, the stock collapsed ~99% and was pushed to the OTC market; agreed to merge with Zeo Energy in 2024 at a tiny valuation)
