Midsummer was founded in 2004 by people with a background from the optical disc manufacturing equipment and the photo mask industry. Midsummer has its head office in Stockholm, Sweden and has some of the most experienced CIGS researchers in Scandinavia.

Thin film solar cells have long been considered as a promising technology for photovoltaics. Thin film CIGS solar cell technology has now been developed for almost 40 years. The technology has matured in the sense that several research groups have reached CIGS solar cell efficiencies over 20%. However, the transition from laboratory research to volume manufacturing has often proven quite hard. Many CIGS companies have ceased operations due to either lack of technical success or difficulties to reach profitability. In many cases, promising laboratory scale results have proven difficult to transfer to large scale volume production at a competitive cost.