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April 2, 2024—In 2024, the Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator (IN2) celebrates its 10th anniversary under the management of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL’s) Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center. As part of the 10-year celebration, NREL is looking back at IN2’s inaugural cohort to see how the companies have progressed over the last decade.
Everything changed when Whisker Labs co-Founder and CEO Bob Marshall’s sister-in-law’s house burned down due to an electrical fire. The family lost everything, including a pet.
“After that, I challenged our team: Can we come up with something that will prevent electrical fires?” Marshall said.
What Whisker Labs does now is not what the company was aiming for when it joined the first IN2 cohort. NREL Senior Research Engineer Bethany Sparn began working with Whisker Labs shortly after the IN2 program got underway. At the time, Whisker Labs’ sensors attached directly to breakers in the breaker panel, connected by a hub to provide circuit-level power data.
“This was a nonintrusive way of monitoring power consumption at the circuit level,” Sparn said. “After rigorous accuracy testing, we did a demonstration in a Wells Fargo building to study installed performance. It was a very novel idea at the time.”
Learn more about Whisker Labs’ progress since participating in the very first IN2 cohort.
