AMPY launched on Kickstarter and has since raised over US$300k in funding
“The average active person generates
enough energy from everyday motion to power a smartphone for three hours” Alex Smith, Mike Geier & Tejas Shastry – co-founders, AMPY
Tell us about yourselves We – the three co-found- ers of AMPY – met during our PhDs in engineering at Northwestern University, US. We wanted to solve a problem we all had: our smartphones dying at the most inconvenient times. We all depend so much on our mobile devices, but we still have no convenient way of making sure they don’t run out of power. Since we were active people, we won-
dered if we could capture some of the energy from our daily activities and use it to power our phones. We all had experi- ence in clean tech start-ups focused on solar, fuel cell and battery technologies. Putting together our shared knowledge of energy harvesting, we came up with the technology advances for AMPY.
So what is AMPY? AMPY is a wearable motion charger that captures energy from your movements and stores it. You can then use that energy
movement – which can offset the carbon foot- print of your smartphone – or from the socket on the wall.
At what stage of its development is AMPY? Over the last two years, we’ve prototyped AMPY
The three co-founders of AMPY met at Northwestern University in the US
to power your smartphone or any other USB-powered device: the average active person generates enough energy from ev- eryday motion to power a smartphone for three hours. Inside of AMPY are our pro- prietary inductors, which couple to your motion and generate electricity that’s stored in a battery inside. When you need it the most, you simply plug in your device to charge it from the energy stored. But it’s a dual mode charger too, mean- ing you can charge it either from your
sportsmanagement.co.uk issue 2 2015 © Cybertrek 2015
and tested it with pilot users to make sure it’s easy to wear and fits in your life. Last autumn, we brought AMPY to the
world by launching a Kickstarter campaign, where we raised over US$300,000. Since then, we’ve been scaling up our manu- facturing to get AMPY to customers by summer of 2015.
Any plans to further develop AMPY? We hope to not only scale and deliver the charger to our customers, but also to integrate our technology directly into wearable devices and power them. We en- vision self-charging smartwatches, fitness trackers and other crazy wearables! Details:
www.getampy.com
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