Solar concentrator developer SolFocus said Tuesday it has landed $52 million, an infusion it says it will use to establish a European subsidiary based in Madrid and to take steps to capture the European market for solar.

A little less than half of the amount will be used to launch SolFocus Europe, the new Madrid-based subsidiary, while the remainder will go to the parent company as a second funding round. New Enterprise Associates was joined in the deal by Moser Baer India, Metasystem Group, NGEN Partners, Yellowstone Capital, David Gelbaum, and other investors, the company said. The infusion brings SolFocus’ total funding to date to $84 million.  

Europe has the “infrastructure and an employee talent base that has a lot of knowledge about solar,” said VP of Marketing Nancy Hartsoch. “In the U.S., there’s a limited amount of people that have a solar background because the business is not as developed here.” A possible second closing at the end of the month could bring the total amount of the infusion to $70 million, she said.

The Mountain View, California-based startup has taken aggressive steps in recent months to secure a foothold in Europe, particularly in Spain, which currently has one of the most attractive incentive programs in the world for solar energy.

Earlier this summer, SolFocus bought Madrid-based Inspira, a maker of devices that, by tracking the sun in two directions, can get up to 40 percent more power from conventional silicon-based panels over the course of a day in sunny climes than conventional trackers, Ms. Hartsoch said.

SolFocus is also at work on a 500-kilowatt installation of concentrated photovoltaic system for the Institute of Concentration Photovoltaic Systems program in Castilla-La Mancha, Spain, the company said.

Solar concentration systems, which use optics to focus sunlight on photovoltaic cells, are the core of SolFocus’s technology, but they are only suitable for areas with a lot of intense sunlight, for example the Mojave Desert.

The company is also developing solar thermal technology, which creates steam heat from solar energy for industrial applications like food processing, agriculture, and oil removal, according to Ms. Hartsoch.

SolFocus Europe will focus on developing products using the parent company’s solar thermal technology and commercializing its tracker technology both for commercial, industrial, and power field conventional, silicon-based photovoltaic systems as well as for concentrator photovoltaic systems for the European market, Ms. Hartsoch said.

Parent company SolFocus expects to earn 60 percent of its sales worldwide from the European market next year, she said.