Meet Global Impact Awards Finalist WattShift, a software startup working to optimize smart energy devices for grid incentive schemes. Founder Will Blanchard (EN ’18) began his entrepreneurial career while he was an engineering student at WashU; his first venture, CyberPowered Home, won the Skandalaris Cup and the Engineering Discovery Competition in 2018. Following graduation, he continued working on the project before moving into a career in the smart home and energy industry. It was this experience that led him to create WattShift, which helps customers optimize their smart thermostats by partnering with smart device manufacturers. WattShift provides the software layer that optimizes smart thermostats for grid incentive schemes by aggregating, modeling, and forecasting live-time data points to deliver cheaper, cleaner power.
Keep reading below to learn more about the ways Blanchard and WattShift are working to make green energy more accessible and more affordable for homes across America.
Will, can you walk us through the origin story of WattShift and what drew you to found it?
I founded my first company, CyberPowered Home, while still at WashU — winning the Skandalaris Cup and Engineering Discovery Competition in 2018. After I graduated, I turned down my consulting job offer to work on CyberPowered Home full-time. It took my co-founder (Allen Nikka EN ‘17) and I another six months after graduating to learn that we weren’t equipped to make CyberPowered Home work. We returned investor money and got jobs. Allen went to Google and I went to be a thermostat product manager at Alarm.com (owner of EnergyHub). I then spent five years working in the smart home and energy industry. That’s where I got my first experience working directly on the problem that WattShift now solves, helping customers to optimize their smart thermostats. In 2023, I enrolled at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago with the idea of WattShift already in my head. Booth gave me the support to transform that idea into a clear concept and team. After my first year, I switched to being a part-time student and have been building WattShift ever since.
What critical problem is WattShift solving, and why is this solution needed now?
WattShift’s software optimizes distributed energy resources — smart thermostats, batteries, water heaters, and more — for grid incentive schemes. We think of our solution as a win-win-win: for end-users, for grid operators, and for the device makers in the middle who are our customers. Grid operators give home energy customers all kinds of incentives to help smooth demand on the grid. Time-of-use rates make energy both cheaper and greener at certain times of the day. Demand response programs reward homes for decreasing energy use during certain periods. WattShift takes advantage of all these incentive categories — five in total — combining them into a single, unified price signal that passively warms and cools homes, keeping customers comfortable and saving them money on monthly bills. For grid operators, this means they get better use out of the tools at their disposal and achieve more balanced load on the grid. For device makers — our customers — we solve what one CEO we work with called the “totally sticky, annoying problem” of device optimization. In practice, it is highly impractical for device makers to invest the 2+ years and $200K required to build their own solutions. This is true for both startups and publicly traded companies. There are 3,000 utilities and over 200,000 regulatory combinations across the US that you must sift through in developing optimization software. Now more than ever, device makers need a solution to the optimization problem that keeps them competitive in a rapidly evolving and electrifying energy ecosystem.
How has the company validated and refined its solution based on market feedback?
We did two National i-Corps cohorts to put structure around our customer discovery process. We’ve done hundreds of interviews at this point. We’ve been extremely proactive reaching out and building connections with potential customers, plenty of whom I already knew from my time in the industry. So far, we’ve been proud to secure Letters of Intent and Design Partnerships with device makers both big and small. We’re currently conducting field tests with our MVP app in multiple states across the country. We’ve learned so much from the real-world data we’re getting, and we’re constantly working to expand our tests to new geographies.
Where do you see WattShift making its biggest impact in the next five years?
Our software makes green energy more accessible and more affordable for homes across America. As the world confronts the existential threat of climate crisis, our minds are foremost on doing what we can to help advance a clean energy future. From a financial perspective, our impact is in the massive, currently untapped stream of revenue that we open up for our device partners through grid incentive schemes. In 2023, the total market for grid incentive schemes in the US was worth $59 billion. With WattShift’s software, around 20% of that figure can be captured as annualized recurring revenue, to be shared between ourselves and device partners.
How would the Global Impact Award help accelerate the company’s growth?
Winning the Global Impact Award would help us fund additional investment in building our software and optimization algorithm. The work to develop WattShift’s software is involved, to say the least — we’re creating a single, unified price signal out of 200,000+ regulatory combinations from all across the United States. That’s a lot! With the GIA, we’ll be able to support our staff, who is hard at work on our software.
What is one piece of advice you would give to a future founder coming out of WashU?
If you have an idea, don’t wait to explore. Give it a try, figure it out, let it evolve. The best idea is the one you see through. Have fun!
Learn more at wattshift.com.
The Global Impact Award (GIA) is made possible by Washington University alumnus Suren G. Dutia and his wife, Jas K. Grewal. The goal of the award is to invest in individuals and high-growth entrepreneurial ventures associated with WashU that have a broad impact and exhibit an interdisciplinary approach to entrepreneurship.
The winner of the 2025 Global Impact Award will be announced at the WashU Innovation & Entrepreneurship Awards on Thursday, April 17. All are invited to attend the awards ceremony to see which team(s) will win up to $75,000 in non-dilutive funding for their venture.