Illustration by Fabio Consoli
From a power-generating soccer ball to a brand-new electrical grid, Jessica O. Matthews has been working on the same problem since she was 19: bringing sustainable power to underserved communities. Although she was born and raised in upstate New York, she often visited family in Nigeria, where she experienced firsthand the problems created by unreliable power, such as outages at hospitals and pollution from diesel generators.
As a student at Harvard, she helped invent the Soccket, a soccer ball that converted kinetic energy into enough power to potentially run a lamp for three hours and was hailed by Barack Obama and Bill Gates. Learning from both the product’s success and quality issues (the ball often broke), Matthews, now 32, founded Uncharted Power, which has developed what’s essentially a high-tech paving system that makes power infrastructure more efficient and sustainable by moving it underground. The New York–based company has raised $12.5 million and counts Disney as an investor and Magic Johnson as a board member. “I got into this thinking: Let me invent something that would inspire people,” she says. “There was quite a bit of learning between 19 and 32.”
On the evolution of her business…
We started with something very playful and fun—soccer balls and jump ropes and things like that—because it was about inspiration through kinetic energy generation. We shifted three years ago because we thought inspiration isn’t enough; we have to start building the infrastructure. We figured out that the issue was specifically related not to generation or storage but the way we build our power grid—the cables you see over your head. That hasn’t changed in the last 100 years. Cables can go in the ground, but it’s really expensive. The Uncharted system is basically a paver system, so you don’t have to trench—it can just be in the top layer of the ground, and we have this smart cabling that monitors the health of the grid at all times.
On becoming the “ethical Google” of energy…
If you look at what Google has given us in terms of digital infrastructure, it’s groundbreaking. From Gmail to Google Search to Google Hangouts, they’ve enabled access to the digital world, and they don’t ask us for a dime. Why? They essentially finance this by selling ad space on their platforms, by selling our data. When I say we’re going to be the ethical Google, what I mean is we [will] actually partner with communities and help cities monetize their data to finance the power infrastructure. Our pavers create not just the full grid network but a tech-ready space for 5G antennas and datacenter hardware that companies can lease. We package up the data and help cities understand and monetize it. That alone can subsidize the power, so that people are getting close-tofree power, in a very sustainable way.
On the impact of COVID-19…
Like any start up, there were a lot of deals that were about to close and just went away, but we were really lucky that our big pilot prog ram did not. As a community, I would say it made us even more intentional around our mission. When you see what COVID did to cities’ budgets, [this issue went] from important to urgent.
On navigating the white male–dominated tech world as a woman of color…
A few people have said if I were a white male we probably would have a lready IPO’d. But the flip side of that is, because we’ve had to be so resilient and enterprising to make things happen, we’ve also become very hard to kill. When you think about the kind of company that’s going to effectively change the way we build something that’s driven the last century, it’s not going to be a company that had it easy on the way up. It’s going to be a company and group of people who know what they’re fighting for, not just as a business but for their personal sakes.
