When the power went out for 36 hours during Sophia Wennstedt’s time as a graduate student at Northwestern, she realized her class project in an NUvention: Energy course could become something much more than an assignment.
“The power went out for 36 hours, and I was like alright, this is not just a problem for me,” Wennstedt told Residents at The Garage on April 16. “This is a huge problem across the country and across the world.”
Now, Wennstedt is the co-founder and CEO of Blip Energy, an energy startup created to provide a power backup solution for residential use that saves money for both everyday residents and utility companies. During Family Dinner at The Garage, Wennstedt spoke to students about the journey of her startup, which recently received a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, and her own journey as a founder.
After graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Harvard, Wennstedt began her career as a mechanical engineer at iRobot, where she worked on the Roomba robot vacuum. After over three years at iRobot, Wennstedt attended a dual-degree graduate program at Northwestern, where she received an MBA from Kellogg and an M.S. in Design Innovation from the Segal Design Institute.
While taking a year off of graduate school, Wennstedt worked at Tesla as a Product Manager. Tesla sells stationary home batteries for cars that must be permanently installed by a certified electrician. Similarly, Wennstedt noticed that most sustainable energy solutions available on the market for someone’s home are expensive and must also be permanently installed. In order to install solar panels, for example, one must own their home, have an extra $40,000 to $100,000 to install the system, and know that they will be in that home for 20 years so that the system pays for itself, according to Wennstedt.
Blip Energy seeks to turn this system on its head.
“I did not think I was going to start a company,” Wennstedt said. “I thought I’d end up in a strategy role at a solar company or something like that. But I took that NUvention course and found a huge opportunity for everyday people with energy in your home.”
Blip Energy’s product, a tall and narrow battery that occupies minimal floor space in a home and is currently priced at $500 per unit, charges overnight and serves as a backup power source during peak electricity pricing periods. This feature can potentially offer significant cost savings to consumers by reducing their reliance on the main power grid during costly high-demand times.
Ultimately, Blip Energy is a product of the complementary strengths of Wennstedt and her co-founder, Northwestern alum Chance Cobb. With a background in utility operations and energy policy, Cobb understood the energy landscape, and Wennstedt’s background as a mechanical engineer working on Roomba allowed her to understand “how to build something people actually wanted to put in their home.”
Through user interviews and observations on forums like Reddit, Wennstedt learned that some people plug their air conditioners into camping batteries to save money at night during surge pricing. She read about others who buy travel versions of their critical medical devices that they keep in the closet in case the power goes out. Power outages across the U.S. cost $150 billion annually, according to the Department of Energy.
In sharing her story as a founder with founders at The Garage, Wennstedt identified the main pain point driving Blip Energy’s mission: The “huge white space” between having expensive, long-term solar panels on your roof or nothing at all.
“What we set out to build,” Wennstedt said, “was a battery that could bridge that gap.”
Nadia Bidarian ’26 is a Journalism, Data Science, and Cognitive Science student from Redondo Beach, California. She is a student aide at The Garage who works on alumni programming, events and other projects for The Garage.
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