Innovations and start-ups continue to emerge from the wireless charging market, and an interesting one is GuRu, a firm founded in 2017 to commercialize research done at the California Institute of Technology from 2011.
GuRu is far from the first firm to offer wireless charging, but CEO and co-founder Florian Bohn told us that it is undoubtedly “the first company to offer room-scale, multi-watt, multi-device, safe wireless power-at-a-distance using millimeter wave technology”.
After receiving almost $10m in funding in 2017 for the CalTech project, Bohn – who was leading that work – decided to scale the technology to a business. GuRu raised $15m to grow its research to a commercially viable business model, and the company currently employs 15 staff.
In an interview with Bohn, it became clear that he believes wireless charging will mushroom to become a mainstay of everyday life. “This will absolutely be a global thing”, he said. “We will not be having to plug in our devices 10 years from now.”
Bohn paralleled GuRu’s charging technology with WiFi, “which was practically non-existent in the late nineties, but was practically everywhere” by the end of the noughties. GuRu’s wireless charging operates in the 24 GHz ISM band. This elevates its signals above most other commonly used unlicensed radio waves for IoT purposes, namely WiFi, Bluetooth and Zigbee.
To give an idea of charging speeds, one of GuRu’s Generator Units can fully charge an iPhone 11’s 13Wh battery from empty in 2-3 hours. Not quite fast charging, but not bad at all. The size of the Generator Unit will vary depending on the use case, but Bohn said that “for a living room, it would be roughly the size of a standard ceiling tile, while for a desk unit, it could be between four and six square inches”.
It is still early days for GuRu – none of its products have gone to market and it seems this milestone is still a couple of years away. Bohn said: “We are not ready to discuss specific dates, but a timeline of 18 months for first products to be in mass production seems reasonable.” From 2022, he added: “I would expect sales to ramp up within a two-year timeframe. Sales would be in millions of units, with units being sold in low dollar amounts, say $10 per unit, for the first year.”
Bohn claimed that a few verticals are taking “heavy interest”, notably the smart home sector, businesses that deploy IoT sensors, and consumer electronics OEMs. All manner of IoT sensors would benefit heavily from wireless charging. “If you have a lot of sensors, you don’t want to wire them up or change battery,” he noted, while outside of the home, the main use cases would be in manufacturing, warehousing and retail.
Wireless charging would tie in well with the prospect of convenience that is flaunted with most smart home devices. “In the smart home sector people want convenience,” explained Bohn. He gave the example of wiring up a security camera to a power source as incredibly time and labor consuming, with the alternative of replacing batteries also off-putting to consumers.
Outside of the smart home, wireless charging can power critical devices in smart buildings such as smoke and security alarms. Retailers are interested in providing power to their sensors for both warehouses and in-store monitoring, without burdening staff with battery-changing tasks.
Equally, the hospitality sector is interested in improving guest experiences as much as possible, be that ensuring the TV remote always works, or that guests don’t run out of charging sockets in a hotel room. Bohn also noted that the health sector has shown interest, and mission-critical sensors in hospitals could be powered through GuRu’s technology.
One obstacle to rapid consumer uptake could be that, for devices to charge from GuRu’s technology, they must have a receiver placed on them. Bohn claimed that OEMs are supportive of the receivers as it allows them to “reduce the battery size” on their products. But this mainly relates to a future when an extensive wireless charging ecosystem will “enable the battery to be recharged and therefore you don’t need to carry around the energy”, so devices can be powered seamlessly as users move around through the day.