Gimmy Chu

THE NANOLEAF CO-FOUNDER ON EARLY DAYS, TALKING TO APPLE AND SMARTER HOMES

- Dan Grabham

It’s 10 years since we started Nanoleaf. We were a group of students in Toronto who built a solar-powered car… and it finished races, which means it was a good car. You learn a lot of concepts in school but you never really get the chance to apply it; so after we graduated, we got back together thinking, ‘Hey, we built this amazing solar car but now we’re doing jobs that have nothing to do with sustainability or solar technology or even building products.’ We were bored.

Our first product was solar, but we didn’t know how to ship lithium-ion for batteries. So we decided to make a really efficient lightbulb, and we soon realised we’d developed the most energy-efficient lightbulb in the world. Let’s put it on Kickstarter and see how that goes… this was in 2013.