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I was born and raised in Mali, West Africa
from a low class family.
i was born in Chittagong, Bangladesh which is
the commercial capital
but my father was from a very
very poor village and a very poor family in Bangladesh
Everything was pretty much
limited. So it was tough growing up.
Lack of energy everywhere.
Students having no access to electricity
I had to pretty much study under
kerosene lamps and candlelight ...
. . . which are very harmful for the lungs and eyes as well.
But I didn't have access to anything better. That was the only choice that I had.
What we have actually developed at June Energy is
basically a handheld device that utilizes clean solar energy, stores it in a battery
and provides light at night through clean-lighting LEDs.
It also has a port on the side where you can actually plug in your
any cell phone that you have and it will actually help charge
your cell phone so people at nighttime can talk and keep in touch with family back in their villages.
Kerosene lamps if you look at it, provides sixty lumens of light
which is really not much, that's why it strains the eyes. Whereas our product, we're looking at
maybe giving sufficient lighting above a hundred lumens
which is really ample for reading at nighttime and provides a good surface area so students can read.
Currently we're
in a a final revision of our beta product. On my business card ...
my role in June Energy is, I'm the chief technical officer
but we're pretty much, everyone does everything, so I guess it's kind of a loose title.
We've build a fully functional prototype and we've done a rapid prototype for the mechanical design of it
and now we're just working on getting cost down actually. Our target price for our
target customers, which are the people in these developing areas, is around $15 or so.
We were traveling back and forth to the Ross Business School,
meeting MBA students from there, we went to the medical school. We talked to the
health officials who told us, 'you know this energy problem? It's in health care, too, because
hospitals in
rural areas of Africa can't operate at night because we have no lighting.'
Our initial market might be like Engineers Without Borders or Peace Corps volunteers, the military is a possibility.
Anywhere, any type of situation where you're in an area without electricity.
In a remote area like hiking trips and things like that.
I'm really excited about our upcoming venture in Singapore, to get more involved with the manufacturing process.
So our next step is to make a second trip to Africa
We're definitely going to go to Kenya
in the next one to two months
to understand how people live there, what are the problems their really facing, and how our solution
can meet and be tailored to solve their problems.
I'm excited already because
I think the dream is coming into reality.
As of a couple weeks ago we just were offered just over half a million dollars of venture capital investment
So we're really excited about that as well.
Since I was a eleven, I've had that mentality: I want to do
engineering and so i can give something back to the society.
It's about helping people.
I'm not happy with the way other people are living. Like, I see things that are happening
and I'm, I don't
I don't think they should live that way, you know?
So it's just,
making a stride toward changing that.