Powerlight

By delivering “whenever/wherever” optical power beaming, PowerLight extends the reach of traditional power distribution and enables this next era of truly wireless connectivity.

Created: 2023-01-14

Updated: 2024-02-24

Company - Powerlight

Founded
Country: 2007; USA

Funding: $4.1M

Website: https://powerlighttech.com/

Social

Product/Service

Classification: Space Utilities

Category: Power Beaming
Resources - Energy

Fields: Wireless Power Transfer

Status: Development

First launch: Not announced

PowerLight is already working with NASA to provide a first ever design concept for wireless power beaming solutions to support lunar operations. These efforts leverage the extensive design, build, and test experiences we’ve developed building pioneering wireless power beaming solutions here on earth. That expertise, and continuing innovations being made now with new wireless power beaming designs, will inform the future development of wireless power beaming solutions that are uniquely suited to meet the extreme challenges posed by future operations in space.

DARPA LunA-10 Program Study, 2023-2024

PowerLight Technologies says it’s joined a team headed by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture to design a power beaming system that might someday charge up robots on the moon.

The effort is being funded by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as part of its LunA-10 program, which supports concepts for future lunar infrastructure projects. DARPA selected 14 industry teams, including Blue Origin’s team, to receive up to $1 million each for studies that are due this spring.

Blue Origin and PowerLight are focusing on a system that could generate power for lunar operations — perhaps using solar cells manufactured on the moon — and then transmit that power to remote locations via laser light. We’ve reached out to Blue Origin for more information about its plans and will update this report with what we hear back.

PowerLight, which was known as LaserMotive when it was founded in 2007, is developing laser-based power transmission systems for a variety of closer-to-home applications, including over-the-air power beaming systems as well as power over fiber-optic cable for telecom equipment, drones and hard-to-reach installations on land and underwater.

PowerLight currently has nearly 30 employees, many of whom work at the company’s 30,000-square-foot facility in Kent. “We’re doing just about roughly six and a half, 7 million [dollars] in revenue in 2023,” Gustafson said. “We have had the benefit of substantial Defense Department funding to the tune of about $30 million, with congressional support along the way.”

Gustafson said his company plans to quicken its pace going forward. “We’re now at a place where we’re going to go through our first institutional round, starting this month, and raising additional capital to help accelerate those areas that we need to press forward on, to be able to disconnect them from the pacing of defense and government funding,” he said. “And so there’s an accelerator there, and we’re excited to be at that point.”

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