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LEHI — Where were you at 19 years old? Maybe you were in college or starting a new job. Two Utah teens are busy in the Silicon Slopes of Lehi, starting their own tech business that may revolutionize the way we think of powering just about everything.
Halston van der Sluys and Cameron Stuart are best friends turned business partners.
“We met in middle school,” said Stuart. “It’s just the perfect partnership, I guess.”
Both are 19 years old with energy for entrepreneurship and a magic touch for tech.
“I started off just coding one line on a computer and I fell in love with it,” van der Sluys said.
The two saw a hole in the market, and last December, went after it by creating “WiWaves.”
“We’ve been doing long distance wireless charging,” van der Sluys said. “We actually use radio frequencies to charge your device over the air. It currently works up to 20 feet.”
They describe it kind of like a Wi-Fi signal, but instead of sending data, it sends power. The power comes from what they call the “capsule” and yes, that still has to be plugged in for now, but the two hope to one day make that cordless as well.
“We think it’s revolutionary — charging your phone from 20 feet away,” Stuart said.
Almost anything with a thin, credit card sized receiver can receive power.
“We realized we could manipulate the waves a little more and that’s when we were like, 'we’re cutting everything we’re doing and just working on this,'” van der Sluys said.
The young business owners don’t want to just stick with powering small devices. They hope to work their way into powering televisions and even refrigerators. They’re already selling the product online and working to increase the range of the capsule to 50 feet, but they hope their company’s reach extends far beyond that.
“We want to be the people to power people’s homes,” Stuart said.
