Techstars Alabama EnergyTech Startup Spotlight: WattsUp

Company name: WattsUp.

Company hometown: Phoenix, Arizona.

Leadership team: Hilary Taylor, co-founder and CEO; Audrey Wooding, co-founder and COO; Sean Lamont, co-founder and CTO.

What is your company’s overall focus and mission?

Hilary Taylor: Our mission is to become the reliability layer for clean energy infrastructure assets by detecting failures before they happen, automating repairs and empowering technicians with the right data to succeed. EV charging is our beachhead market. But this is bigger than technology. We’re enabling the electrified workforce, giving technicians and electricians the tools they need to thrive in the clean energy economy – and making sure that all communities, including underserved ones, have equitable access to reliable charging.

What inspired you to start this company? How do you want to contribute to the future of energy and tech?

Taylor: WattsUp’s co-founding team comes from 25 years of experience in the EV & EV charging space. We met at our last company, building and deploying the world’s fastest DC Fast Charger. We have felt the pain point we are solving firsthand. This experience served as the firepower for co-founding WattsUp.

What attracted you to the Techstars Alabama EnergyTech Accelerator?

Taylor: What attracted us to the Techstars Alabama EnergyTech Accelerator was the perfect alignment between our mission and the program’s focus. Alabama is at the center of America’s growing EV and energy transition, with utilities and grid modernization all converging here. We know that Techstars Alabama will provide the mentorship, Google Tag Manager expertise, industry partner and investor access we need for long-term success and scalability.

What is the No. 1 thing you’d like potential investors to understand about your company?

Taylor: The number one thing I want potential investors to understand is that WattsUp is not just another charging software. We are building a machine-learning-driven reliability layer for clean energy infrastructure.

We’ve started with EV chargers because they’re highly distributed and customer-facing – the perfect proving ground. And we already have a large and growing dataset of over 300 million charger data points across multiple brands and geographies, which powers our proprietary predictive models. But our platform isn’t limited to chargers. The same predictive maintenance and automation engine can be applied across batteries, solar and microgrids.

That means we’re not just solving today’s downtime problem; we’re building a scalable, defensible platform that will support the reliability of the entire renewable ecosystem. And in doing so, we’re also enabling the electrified workforce and ensuring equitable access to clean energy.

What takeaways do you hope to gain for your company by taking part in the Techstars Alabama EnergyTech Accelerator?

Taylor: By participating in the Techstars Alabama EnergyTech Accelerator, we’re aiming to gain three critical things: 1. Deep industry connections and partnerships, 2. Mentorship and accelerated learning from proven experts, 3. Access to capital, investor networks and market credibility.

In short, we believe Techstars Alabama will give us velocity: velocity in market penetration, velocity in product refinement and velocity in scaling WattsUp into the reliability layer for renewable infrastructure.

What is your opinion of Alabama and Birmingham so far?

Taylor: Birmingham has been so much fun so far. It’s rich in culture, good food and amazing people. Techstars and Alabama Power have welcomed us with so much warmth and open arms. We feel lucky to be here.

Contact: Wattsup Powering the Future – AI Enhanced Reliability; LinkedIn.

We are profiling the cohort companies of the 2025 Techstars Alabama EnergyTech Accelerator.