As the co-founder of Aquila Earth, a startup that sends electricity via lasers, software developer and Old Boy Billy Jeremijenko (2018) with mechatronics engineer Nelson Smith have won $3m in seed funding from a range of Australian venture capital firms. The pair, who share a larger vision for the future of energy transmission, met online during a four-week engineering fellowship course. With the aim of commercialising the wireless energy transmission technology that eccentric physicist Nikola Tesla dreamed was possible almost 130 years ago, Billy says “We’re taking electricity from power lines and poles along a direct route and extending it through a dynamic, wireless network. Think of it as like the leap from dial up internet to Wi-Fi.” With Aquila wanting to take the technology further in a bid to create the ‘internet of energy’, the seed funding will be spent on scaling up the technology that it has already proven at low power levels.

Aquila’s technology has shown that by using optical relay systems and solar panel receivers it can power drones in flight. With the prototype delivering longer flight times and lower battery weight, supplying power continuously to drones in-flight could unlock infinite possibilities, including creating flight corridors in which an aircraft would be able to continuously recharge while travelling past wireless power supplies. Billy says, “Having discovered the ability to enable wireless energy transfer via light safely, cheaply and at high power, we are now left with the fun engineering challenge to build it.”