uBeam has had a rollercoasters existence. University of Pennsylvania student Meredith Perry founded the company in a garage in the year 2011 and raised 26$ million in funding from investors including Marissa Mayer CEO of Yahoo, Marc Andreessen, and Mark Cuban, who referred to the concepts as a “zillion-dollar idea.” The company’s sound wave-based tech remained secretive. Several investor admitted they’d never actually seen it in actions, which fueled suspicion among industry watchers that it might not live up to Perry’s promise.
All the while, Perry stood by her inventions. “We’ve proved out the technology,” she said at a conference in May 2016, “and we are on our way to deploying the products to the world.”
Then, the company’s former VP of engineering wrote a series of blog post accusing the company, essentially, of being a fraud. Paul Reynolds, who has 20 years of experiences with ultrasound, wrote last year that the company had overstated its technology’s capabilities and wasn’t close to delivering a working prototypes.
This week, uBeam finally unveiled its technology. The company demonstrated its devices for USA Today, according to a report published Thursday, and it worked almost as advertised. With no cable, the company’s transmitters was able to charge a phone in a reporter’s hand about four feet away from the Devices.
While uBeam still has a lot of development works before it can produce a marketable products, the demo may help the startup get past the intense skepticisms it faced just a year ago. Perry wouldn’t make any prediction about when it might commercialize its technology, but USA Today reports that it’s still at least a year away.
Perry was frank about how the criticisms has affected her life. “As a first-time founder and as a scientists, to have people question your integrity is horrible,” she told the publications. “It was extremely painful.”
“In that same weeks that all that stuff was being said about me, that I was a fraud, we had these big technological breakthrough,” she said. “So I just tried to focus on my teams, to keep them going. So we could prove everybody wrong.”
The Santa Monica-based company currently has 30 employee. There’s a lot at stake: According to Allied Market Research, the markets for wireless charging will be $37.2 billion by 2022.
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