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Polaris Venture Partners has pumped an additional $1 million in seed capital into Cambridge, MA-based solar fuel startup Sun Catalytix, bringing its total investment in the MIT spinout to $3 million, Polaris general partner and company director Bob Metcalfe tells Xconomy.

The startup, which we first covered in April, has also gained an exclusive license to patents based on discoveries made by company founder and chemist Daniel Nocera at MIT. Nocera has invented a catalyst that mimics photosynthesis to turn water and an energy source such as sunlight into renewable fuel. Sun Catalytix is at work to increase the scale at which the technology can produce fuel, Metcalfe said. The U.S. Department of Energy is also supporting the firm’s research, awarding it a $4.1 million grant through its Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy program this fall.

Sun Catalytix, which garnered its first seed investment from Polaris last year, is among a growing number of companies and research groups that aim to harness the abundant energy from of the sun in the form of fuel. Cambridge, MA-based Joule Biotechnologies, formed and backed by Flagship Ventures in 2007, and Maynard, MA-based Nanoptek are part of this pack as well. It’s not been proven that any of these technologies can work at a scale and cost that is competitive with crude oil, but the promise of these technologies has motivated venture investors and the government to reach deep into their pockets to make them commercially viable.

“We’re still seed-stage,” Metcalfe says of Sun Catalytix, “which means the future is bright but uncertain.”

Metcalfe, a leader of the clean technology practice at Waltham-based Polaris, didn’t seem afraid to tell me that Sun Catalytix doesn’t have a definite plan for how it plans to bring its technology to market. The startup, which now has five employees, has been focused on building systems that can demonstrate how well the technology works with different types of water and with larger volumes of water than Nocera used in his lab at MIT. (Separate experiments have successfully demonstrated the technology using water from the Charles River and Boston Harbor, Metcalfe says, but yet another experiment that tested antifreeze as an alternative to water for using the system in freezing weather didn’t quite work.) Nocera has been a proponent of so-called “personalized energy,” with individuals using systems that incorporate technologies like his water-splitting catalyst to meet their own energy needs.

Sun Catalytix is developing several different catalysts to perform a water-splitting reaction. Nocera’s research, published last year in Science, showed that a catalyst could be used to separate oxygen from water, leaving hydrogen molecules that could be used to make hydrogen fuel. The catalyst used in that published research consisted of a metal electrode placed in water containing cobalt and phosphate. Metcalfe says that a key feature of Nocera’s catalyst is that it is self-repairing, meaning that it can repeat the water-splitting reaction over and over again.

The company is still assembling an executive team to lead its nascent operation. Amir Nashat, a general partner at Polaris, serves as founding CEO of the startup on an interim basis and shares some of the company-building duties with Metcalfe, Metcalfe says. The chairman of the company is Arthur Goldstein, the retired chairman and CEO of water purification and desalinization giant Ionics, which General Electric scooped up for $1.1 billion in 2005. The plan at Sun Catalytix is to recruit a more permanent CEO to lead the company in and also close a Series A round of venture capital that includes multiple backers. (For now, Metcalfe says, Polaris is the sole venture investor supporting the company.)

Metcalfe says that he expects the new chief executive to complete a business plan for the company. It’s likely that the company will seek corporate partnerships that would help it to integrate its technology with solar panels, wind turbines, and/or fuel cells, he says. The startup’s technology would use power from these systems to make fuels, so that people who rely on solar panels for electricity could have power when the sun isn’t shining, for example. Gaseous and liquid fuels generally pack much more energy density than batteries, which are the standard for of energy storage used with wind turbines and solar panels.

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