Evgentech | Fast tracking battery charging

Evgentech’s pulse charging technology provides a kinder and gentler charge. By leveraging a battery’s chemical behavior (not working against battery chemistry as do existing processes), Evgentech allows faster charging without damage or compromising safety.

Earlier this week we told you about their team, funding history and their potential impact on the industry. CHECK IT OUT then read on to find out about Evgentech’s revenue model, inspiration, and competition from their CEO, Jackie Hutter

What is your revenue model?
We are still doing discovery on this topic, however, it would appear that our model will more likely be based on licensing our well-protected technology into various markets.

How’d You Get The Idea?
Quite honestly, if you were setting out to charge a battery, you wouldn’t do it this way. The “hackers” were messing about with circuitry a few years back to try gain a leg up on the power company. They weren’t originally trying to charge batteries, but they ended up doing so after a late-night digression with their circuit. I am an IP expert, and they reached out to me to help them with their patent protection. When they showed me what they had, I said “the battery should have exploded when you did that!” Realizing there was something unique and potentially a scientific breakthrough, but seeing that these “hackers” did not have the wherewithall to move the idea forward, I found some PhD domain experts who were as curious as I was about how the odd circuit performed. This resulted in a 2 year or so journey by the team (we were working on this in our free time as a “labor of scientific curiosity”) to scour the literature and conduct experiments to figure out what the heck was happening in the original circuit.

Who are your competitors and how do you stand out?
Certainly, the status quo is our biggest competitor–while we consumers hate how long it takes to charge our Li-ion batteries, OEMs are conservative with batteries, both for purposes of longevity and safety. This means that charging improvements are not high up on their list of product development objectives. Samsung has just introduced a supposed accelerated (15 minute) charge, but this is a marketing ploy, we know that they are not reconfiguring their plugs, which means they are just pushing conventional charging a bit harder. Indeed, the 15 minute Samsung charge provides “up to 8 hours of life,” which means that your device might not die in that time, but you sure as heck won’t be using it much, either. There is a well-funded company called “Qnovo” on the West Coast that has created a chip for integration into mobile devices that purports to improve charging speeds, but we don’t see any evidence that an OEM has adopted their technology. From their patent filings, we know their approach is much more complex than ours. We understand that time is of the essence to our development pathway, as there are likely other folks out there working on unconventional approaches like ours, and we could lose out if they beat us to adoption by the market.

How does ATL weave into your story?
I have lived in ATL since 1996. It’s my home, so it’s where my startup is based. We are now partnering with Georgia Tech for testing and, hopefully, further development, so if all goes as planned Evgentech will become an ATL startup success story in the near future.

[Photo Credit]