June Energy launches portable solar charger to world

Wednesday, February 16, 2011 | Source: Concentrate

June Energy's co-founders, Md. Shahnoor Amin and Abdra Traore, came from the Third World -- and the Michigan college students are looking to give back to it with their Ann Arbor-based start-up.

June Energy has developed and begun to sell a portable cell phone charger that uses small solar panels to generate its own electricity. The two engineering students originally set out to find a way to bring electricity to all parts of the Third World so people no long have to trek long distances to charge a cell phone. Nine months later the pair came up with a small solution to a big problem.

"How can we implement electricity in these places that don't have it?" says Amin, an engineering student at the University of Michigan. "Instead of doing something big, why don't we do something small? We ended up designing something portable people can carry around."

June Energy, based out of the TechArb, has also found a demand for these devices in the U.S. It now has orders for 40 of them at $80 a pop that it expects to fill by this week. The 18-month-old start-up plans to use these sales to help push the price point down so they can become cost competitive in the Third World.

Amin and Abdra, together with CTO Allen Taylor, want to begin selling the units in their home countries, Bangledesh and Mali, later this year. They hope to have a foothold in the First and Third World markets by the end of the year. They are also working on some other products to add to June Energy's portfolio.

"We have some really cool products that we are in the design phase right now," Amin says.

Source: Md. Shahnoor Amin, co-founder of June Energy
Writer: Jon Zemke

Read more about Metro Detroit's growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at SEMichiganStartup.com.