One of Charlotte’s hottest new companies, a self-described “high-risk Tesla of the electrical space” and recipient of the NC Technology Association Award has been changing the landscape of electrical engineering since their product launch last year.
Atom Power formed in 2014, headed by University of North Carolina at Charlotte grad, Ryan Kennedy alongside Virtual Power Systems’ Denis Kouroussis as chief technology officer and Greg Crumpton as chief marketing officer.
Kenney spent the past two decades building circuit breakers and studying electricity, both as a hard-hat electrician and engineering student. With Atom Power, he designed a solid-state circuit breaker for industrial and commercial markets, as well as a panel to house multiple Atom Power switches and an app to oversee and control the system once installed.
“We built a couple of prototypes that were commercially viable found that there were some folks that had more money than us that thought that this was something we could turn into a business,” Kennedy said.
Atom Power kicked into high gear in the spring of 2015 following their first round of fundraising in Charlotte.
“The whole goal of the company was to build a commercially viable solid-state circuit breaker, something that many companies have tried through the last 40 years,” Kenney said. “In the electrical space to build a solid state circuit breaker is kind of like in the world of physics to say you’re going to build a fusion reactor. It’s that kind of Holy Grail of what you’d ever want to do as a power engineer.”
Kennedy and his team have been successful so far. They count Bosch and Lockheed Martin among their customers and picked up a North Carolina Technology Association award in November.
“We’re kind of the high-risk Tesla in the electrical space,” Kennedy said. “No one’s making this stuff.”
The company works out of UNC Charlotte’s Portal building; through this space, Kennedy and the team are able to work with the university’s small business incubator, Ventureprise. Most of Atom Power’s employees come from the UNC Charlotte electrical engineering program.
Though they work closely with the university, due to the nature of their company – high-risk hardware and software – the Atom Power team doesn’t spend much time interacting with other startups, Kennedy said. He does, however, have a few bits of advice to share with entrepreneurs just starting out.
“This sounds a little bit cliche but I will say the one thing that we’ve all noticed doing this is that at every corner – and this could be the nature of what we’re doing, but I imagine it’s true for any company trying to do something new – is that at every corner we’re facing failure, all the time,” he said. “The first initial ideas will seem crazy and stupid and like they’re way too expensive and difficult to do, but if you believe it’s the right thing for the world and for society and whatever the case is, then that’s what should drive it.”
