wamda.com - In the 20th century, Saudi Arabia was a global power thanks to oil; in the 21st century, it might still play a dominant role - but this time through a less expected avenue: renewable energy.

MaterialSolved, a startup incubated by one of the Kingdom’s research universities, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, is designing software to manage the performance of solar photovoltaic (PV) cells.

“Like the software that architects use to design and visualize buildings, our software will be used to design, visualize and predict PV Cells,” cofounder Amal Aboulhassan said. “We are planning to start installing the first paid commercial beta on next year.”

The first version will be tested with five to 10 international universities that have research collaborations with KAUST before taking it global to corporate research parks, Aboulhassan said.