Turned a Liberia observation into Africa's first certified multi-light solar system.
Solo-founded. Venture-backed. Built BrightBox — a $100 solar kit designed to be repaired by local electricians using locally-sourced parts. 25,000 deployed. Partners from Coca-Cola to Schneider Electric to Kiva. The tech-curve-spotting pattern that would later define Formlabs started here.
Three cost curves were collapsing at once: LED lighting efficiency, photovoltaic panel prices, and lithium-ion battery energy density. Together, they made it possible to build an off-grid household solar system for roughly $100 that five years earlier would have cost several thousand dollars.
Most incumbents in the African off-grid space hadn't fully priced this in. They were still optimizing for the old cost structure — larger systems, higher margins, top-down distribution through NGOs and government tenders. The new economics opened up a different market: households and kiosk owners who could buy a system outright, or on short-term financing, and get a return on their investment in a few months.
One Degree didn't start as a venture-funded company. It started as a side project I ran while consulting on health and energy systems work — selling a small number of units to NGO partners, learning what worked, gathering field signal. The pivot to a full-time funded company came in 2012, when nurses we'd sold to in Liberia told us their friends were asking where to buy the product in local markets. That observation reframed the business: the demand wasn't institutional, it was retail. We changed the model — from NGO sales to local resellers and distributors — and it became fundable.
BrightBox: designed for the Rift Valley, not for a trade show.
Before we designed anything, we ran field research — 200+ interviews across 7 countries, from kiosk owners in Nairobi to farmers in rural Ethiopia to market traders in Ghana. One insight shaped the entire product.
In more than 90% of our interviews, when we asked what brand people most wanted to own, the answer was Toyota. Not because Toyota was the most luxurious — because Toyota was the most reliable, easiest to service, and had parts available in every town.— From BrightBox field research, 2012
That became the design philosophy. BrightBox had to feel like the Toyota of solar: not the most premium system available, but the most dependable — servicable by local electricians, built from locally-sourced parts, and architected so that a village repair shop could keep it running indefinitely.
The research produced specific, measurable design decisions:
Weight signals durability. Customers consistently preferred heavier products — heavier felt more solid, more valuable, less likely to break. When we moved to lithium-ion and the system got lighter, we considered adding a rubber weight to preserve the perceived-durability signal.
Port separation matters. Competing products put all ports on one side, creating cable chaos during daily use. We put daily-use ports on the front and install-once ports on the back, with right-angle connectors so cables tucked cleanly against the wall.
Measure actual cable runs. Customers told us they needed seven meters of cable to reach from a wall-mounted panel to a table lamp. We measured their houses directly and found they actually needed eight. Competitors shipped five. That single discrepancy was responsible for a meaningful share of failed installations in the category.
Bright packaging, not sleek. Dark packaging looked premium in design mockups but got dusty and invisible on retail shelves in rural Kenya. Bright orange packaging — close to BrightBox's own color — stayed visible, stayed bought.
Language follows the product. Focus groups called competitors "solar lanterns" (a category word). They called BrightBox "stima" — the Swahili word for electricity. That single linguistic shift told us the product was in a different mental category.
BrightBox went from concept sketches through 3D printing, to Chinese factory floors (where I personally visited on multiple trips), to three product versions — v1 with a repurposed motorbike battery, v2 with a lithium-ion BrightBox Plus, and a 2016 range. Across all versions, we deployed 25,000+ systems reaching 200,000+ individuals. Partner on design: Catapult Design. Product patented.
In parallel, we sold roughly 20,000 single-light solar lanterns through the same distribution network — not novel as a product, but useful for reaching customers at lower price points and as a gateway to BrightBox upgrades. The total deployment across both products served as our distribution proof point with Coca-Cola and Schneider.
BrightBox became Africa's first certified multi-light solar system, meeting the international quality standards that opened doors a small Nairobi startup couldn't have opened otherwise.
First pico-solar company to partner with Coca-Cola — after years of competitor attempts.
Coca-Cola's branded metal kiosks are in the most remote towns and the busiest cities across Africa. Over 70% of small businesses in Western Kenya, where ODS began operations, relied on candles, kerosene, or disposable batteries for lighting. Those kiosks were Coke's last mile. Electrifying them was a business case, not a charity case.
I personally interviewed a dozen kiosk owners in Nairobi — 2-hour site visits each, with us delivering a BrightBox and observing how they used it in real time. What we found: 90%+ used candles or kerosene inside the shop at night. Eye irritation and fumes were universal complaints. Most who had tried solar before had experienced product failures and had no way to reach the supplier for support.
From there: I designed a field research survey, refined the methodology with Nielsen, and presented the business case to Coca-Cola corporate leadership in both the US and Africa. We secured the order.
The pilot went to 100 kiosk owners. Nielsen ran independent post-pilot research. Weekly energy costs dropped 90%. Weekly sales rose 15%. The Coca-Cola Company committed to scale from 100 to 2,000 kiosks and designated ODS a preferred vendor. The international press coverage that followed led to our first equity investment.
Since I received the Brightbox, I don't use candles anymore. I can open my shop for a few extra hours each day. Since I stopped using candles and kerosene, I save $15 weekly. This may not seem like much to big businesses, but to a small entrepreneur it's quite significant.— Jemimah Njoki, kiosk operator, Kenya
After-sales service is the unsolved problem of African hardware. I built the software layer for it in 2012.
One of the reasons customers who had tried solar before had been burned wasn't the hardware — it was the absence of any after-sales service infrastructure. If your product broke, you had no way to reach the supplier. Warranties were paper-based. Complaints went into a void.
In 2012, I wrote a full RFP with customer storyboards and circulated it to dozens of mobile technology firms across Africa, India, and the US. We negotiated a partnership with Echo Mobile, a Kenya-based mobile platform, under which they built the features we'd conceptualized at no upfront cost in exchange for a one-year exclusivity window on the product.
The features: a paperless digital warranty that validated serial numbers against a master list, automated seasonal maintenance reminders sent by SMS, customer satisfaction surveys, customer segmentation, and referral incentive programs. In 2012, none of this was standard in emerging-market hardware. The program was recognized by WorldWatch Institute, ICT Works, and Echo Mobile as a pioneering model for after-sales service and inventory management.
The operational impact was specific: we could tell when a product was failing before a customer complained. We could convert satisfied customers into referrers automatically. We could track inventory reliably across a 45-person distributed team. It was the kind of infrastructure that turns hardware into a service business.
The Liberia health-clinic observation came full circle.
One of the product extensions I'm most quietly proud of is Headlamps for Health — a purpose-built concept for community health workers making home visits after dark. Last Mile Health (since recognized as a data.org innovation challenge awardee) used the devices to enable tuberculosis patient visits and improve care quality in rural Liberia, in the same country where I'd first noticed the clinic-electricity problem six years earlier.
The loop closed: Liberia observation → USAID Powering Health → BrightBox design → Headlamps for Health → Liberian CHWs using the product I'd built to address the problem I'd first seen working beside them.
Al Jazeera filmed us in the Rift Valley.
In 2013, Al Jazeera's earthrise came to Kenya to film an episode called "Solar Revolution." The first six minutes and forty seconds are One Degree Solar — Rift Valley villages, kiosks running on BrightBox, our team in Nairobi, and the broader story of cost-curve-driven electrification in Africa.
Distribution is the hardest problem, not the product. We could build a great solar kit. Getting it into 25,000 hands required Coca-Cola's logistics, Kiva's financing, Living Goods' field network, and hundreds of resellers. The hardware was the easier half.
Full P&L teaches what nothing else can. Nothing prepared me for the daily weight of making payroll, managing supply chain risk, pricing capital, and being the person everyone looks to when something breaks. That experience shaped every role that came after.
Operations across East Africa, investors in France, manufacturing in China — the company structure required constant international travel. Then, in 2016, my son was born at 25 weeks. Four months in the NICU. The kind of experience that reorders priorities completely. I started thinking about what healthcare innovation closer to home could look like — work I could do from the United States, near family, with a problem space that hit much closer than I'd realized.
That re-framing pointed toward medical 3D printing, and toward a company I'd been quietly watching for two years. I left One Degree Solar in early 2017.