Jessica O. Matthews is a Nigerian-American inventor, Founder, CEO and venture capitalist born on February 13, 1988.
She is a founding member of the company Uncharted, which created the Soccket, a soccer ball that doubles as a portable power source. Matthews graduated from the Harvard Business School and Harvard College.
She was recognized by Fortune as one of the “10 Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs” in 2011and as one of the “Most Promising Women Entrepreneurs” in 2015. She was selected “Scientist of the Year” in 2012 by the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Racial Relations. The President of Nigeria designated her as the nation’s “Ambassador for Entrepreneurship.”
Matthews, a dual citizen of the United States and Nigeria, was raised in Poughkeepsie, New York. She is the middle kid of four. Her sister, Tiana Idoni-Matthews, is now the marketing director of Uncharted Play, and her parents own and operate Decision Technologies International, a software company. When Matthews was a student, she participated in science competitions and track and field while attending Our Lady of Lourdes High School. Matthews later attended Harvard Business School after majoring in economics at Harvard College.
Jessica O. Matthews’ Career
Uncharted Play
In 2008, when Matthews was a junior in college, she and her classmate Julia Silverman created Soccket as a project for an engineering course. According to her, the experience she had at her aunt’s wedding in Nigeria served as the inspiration for the invention. When the electricity went out and diesel generators had to be utilized to keep the lights on, Matthews realized the danger the fumes posed to health and made the decision to try to address it. She and Silverman presented Soccket, a soccer ball that stores kinetic energy as it is used, as their suggested remedy.
Soccer ball activity also gives kids a reading light so they can complete their homework after dark. A half-hour of soccer ball play produces enough energy to run a small, attachable LED light for three hours. To develop Soccket, the two created Uncharted Power, with Matthews serving as CEO.
Following her 2010 college graduation, Matthews accepted a full-time position at CrowdTap, a firm that facilitates crowdfunding. She quit that business the next year in order to focus solely on Uncharted Power, initially raising money through Kickstarter and later on using convertible loans. On President Barack Obama’s 2013 tour to Tanzania, she also presented Soccket at the Clinton Global Initiative University.
The company also produces a jump rope called the Pulse that stores energy similarly to the Soccket and can be used for 15 minutes of jumping rope to provide three hours of electricity for an LED.
Matthews relocated manufacture to Uncharted Play’s own facilities in New York after the original manufacturing run of Soccket experienced serious quality control problems.
She then turned the company’s emphasis to creating a wider range of kinetic-energy-storing goods in collaboration with knowledgeable manufacturers. This change included trademarking the Motion-based Off-Grid Renewable Energy (MORE) technology, which makes use of Soccket’s energy-storing technique in consumer goods other than toys.
“Matthews describes her company’s proprietary MORE technology as an energy harvesting and emanating building block that can be seamlessly integrated into various infrastructures, objects and products — everything from floor panels, streets, speedbumps and sidewalks, to subway turnstiles, strollers, shopping carts and beyond.
Uncharted Power
Uncharted Power has tripled its gross profit margins over the three years prior to 2016, when it became profitable. Uncharted Power received $7 million in Series A funding from Matthews in 2016, valuing the business at $57 million. According to TechCrunch, this made Matthews the 13th black woman founder to secure funding of at least $1 million. In underdeveloped nations, particularly in Africa and Latin America, 500,000 Socckets and Pulses had been utilized as of March 2017.
When Matthews relocated Uncharted Power to Harlem, New York, in 2016, she also established a non-profit organization called the Harlem Tech Fund (HTF). Over the next two to five years, the HTF hopes to fund 100 new entrepreneurs and provide technological training to 10,000 inhabitants of Harlem. Matthews oversees HTF’s board of directors as its chairman. She was given the Outstanding Corporate Diversity Award at the Harlem Economic Development Day that same year.
Matthews has grown to work on international infrastructure initiatives. She is the executive director and co-founder of KDDC, which is building a hydroelectric dam project in Nigeria. One of the first hydroelectric dam projects in Nigeria to be privatized is the 30-megawatt dam. She was named by the American Secretary of Energy to the committee’s electricity advisory board in 2021. (EAC).
