Jeff Yen

Jeff Yen runs an eleven-person company that wants to change how electricity behaves. Etherdyne Technologies, headquartered on Bunker Hill Lane in Santa Clara, builds what Yen calls Ether Power - wireless electricity delivered not to a single phone on a single pad, but to a whole zone. A desk. A countertop. Eventually, a room. Devices inside that zone draw what they need and keep running. The cord becomes a memory.

In January 2026, Yen carried that idea onto the show floor at CES. Etherdyne set up an "Ether Power Desk" and let it speak for itself: a monitor, a phone, a speaker and a laptop, all running with nothing plugged into the wall. The power came from a three-dimensional field, using low-frequency magnetic resonance tuned to 6.78 MHz. A laptop pulled up to 50 watts. The whole zone could push up to 100. Nothing was touching a charging mat. Nothing had to be lined up just right.

"We've reached an inflection point. What Nikola Tesla once imagined is no longer just a lab demo."

That is Yen's whole thesis in two sentences. Wireless power has been the stuff of science fair posters and venture pitch decks for a century - beautiful in theory, disappointing in practice. Yen's argument is that the theory finally caught up. Eight years of patient physics, forty-three granted patents, and the signatures of the FCC and CE regulators say he is not entirely alone in believing it.

Yen did not arrive at wireless power by way of a business plan. He arrived by way of a physics department. He studied physics and astrophysics at UC Berkeley, then earned a PhD in experimental physics at Stanford. Somewhere in those Stanford years he met Robert Moffatt, another physics PhD candidate. The two clicked over the kind of problem that keeps physicists up at night - how to move real, useful amounts of energy through empty air.

In May 2016 they turned the obsession into a company. Yen became CEO. Moffatt became Chief Science Officer. Together they are listed as co-inventors on the magnetic resonance technology that Etherdyne is built on, and co-authors on multiple IEEE papers. It was not a weekend hackathon. It was eight years of refinement before they were willing to call it a product.

"Our mission is to spark radical innovation by freeing devices from cords and batteries."

The framing Yen likes is "Electrification 2.0" - the notion that power should stop being a fixed point you walk toward and become an ambient field you walk into. He compares it to Wi-Fi. Once data slipped its wires, whole categories of devices appeared that nobody had drawn on a napkin first. Yen is betting electricity has the same move left in it. The wall outlet, in this telling, is not a solved problem. It is a hundred-year-old habit that everyone stopped questioning.

To pull it off, he built a bench deeper than eleven people suggests. Etherdyne's leadership has drawn engineers and operators from Apple, Cisco, Motorola, Nokia and HP. The plan is not to become a gadget brand. It is to license the Ether Power platform to everyone else - a strategy analysts have compared to being the "Intel Inside" of wireless power. The technology is meant to disappear inside other people's products, which is a peculiar ambition for a founder: to build something so useful that nobody remembers your name while they use it.

There is a discipline in that patience that sets Yen apart from the usual hardware sprinter. Wireless power has a long graveyard of companies that demoed a glowing light bulb across a room, raised a round, and then discovered that a lab bench and a shipping product are separated by an ocean of regulation, safety physics and thermal reality. Yen and Moffatt chose to spend the years in that ocean before surfacing. By the time the Ether Power Desk lit up at CES, the hard questions - how much power, how safely, how far from the transmitter, with what interference - already had answers on file with the regulators.