Sean Burke spent two decades shipping laptops and phones for HP, Dell and Flex. Now, at Enteligent, he is trying to keep solar electricity in DC form all the way from the panel to your car battery - and win back the energy the grid quietly loses in between.
There is an argument about electricity that most people assume was settled in 1893. Alternating current won. Direct current lost. The grid that lights the world runs on AC, and it has for more than a century. Sean Burke has spent the last few years politely pointing out that the world changed its mind and forgot to tell the wiring.
Solar panels produce direct current. Batteries store direct current. The motor in an electric car runs on direct current. And yet, in a typical setup, the power your roof generates gets flipped from DC to AC so it can travel through household wiring, then flipped back to DC to charge your car. Two conversions. Two tolls paid. Burke's company, Enteligent, exists to skip both.
Our mission is to drive a paradigm shift in energy consumption habits by leveraging abundant solar power and our innovative technology to facilitate society's transition to electrification. Sean Burke, CEO & Co-Founder, Enteligent
It is a grand sentence for a company whose core product is, in essence, a box that refuses to do unnecessary work. But the restraint is the point. Enteligent bills its charger as the world's first solar-powered DC-to-DC EV charger, and the pitch is subtraction, not addition: take the electrons you already have, in the form you already have them, and stop throwing a fifth of them away.
Burke did not arrive at clean energy through activism. He arrived through hardware. His resume reads like a tour of the companies that built the modern computing industry - Hewlett-Packard, where he was a vice president; Dell; Flex, where he ran the Computing Division; Nortek, where he was a group president; plus stops at AMD, Iomega and NCR. He was around for the first notebook computer. Later, he is credited with creating the first dual-screen Android phone, a device ahead of its moment.
The through-line is not any one gadget. It is power electronics and the discipline of shipping physical products at scale. Teams he led are credited with more than 260 patents. When you have spent that long thinking about how current moves through a laptop - how much heat you lose, how many conversion steps you can shave - you start to see the same waste everywhere. Including on the roof.
Here is the loss, drawn out. In a conventional home-solar-plus-EV setup, sunlight becomes DC at the panel, an inverter converts it to AC for the house, and the car's onboard charger converts it back to DC for the battery. Each conversion sheds energy as heat. Enteligent's claim is that keeping the whole path in DC recovers roughly 20% that would otherwise vanish between panel and battery.
Fig 1. The conventional round trip. Enteligent's design keeps power in DC end-to-end, aiming to recover the losses. Figures reflect the company's stated efficiency claims.
That number is why the company can talk about cost savings without hand-waving. Twenty percent of a fleet's daily charge, multiplied across dozens of vehicles and thousands of days, stops being a rounding error and becomes a line item. Enteligent's first commercial deployment leans exactly that direction: a long-dwell-time 25kW DC-to-DC charger supplied to a large logistics company to power a newly electrified delivery fleet - vehicles that sit parked long enough to sip power slowly and cheaply from the sun.
Fig 2. Enteligent says its TLCEV T1 EVSE delivers roughly double many AC Level 2 chargers by drawing DC straight from on-site solar. Values are approximate and drawn from company materials.
Burke tends to frame Enteligent less as an EV-charging company and more as an efficiency company that happens to plug into cars. At industry events he has argued that energy optimization is the next phase of decarbonization - the idea that using every kilowatt of renewable energy well matters as much as generating more of it. It is a subtly different bet than the one most of the sector is making. The mainstream story is build more: more panels, more turbines, more capacity. His footnote to that story is waste less of what you build.
Energy optimization is the next phase of decarbonization - using every kilowatt of renewable energy with greater efficiency and lower cost. Sean Burke, on stage at an industry summit
It is also why the product line is broader than a single charger. Enteligent's NMax PV module-level power optimizers, which include rapid-shutdown safety and panel-level monitoring, claim about 10% higher output from a typical rooftop array. Pair that with a DC-to-DC charger and a solar-native EVSE, and the company is quietly assembling a DC microgrid - a small, self-contained ecosystem where power is generated, stored and consumed without ever asking the AC grid for permission.
The bidirectional part is where it gets interesting for anyone who has watched a utility bill climb. A charger that moves power both ways turns a parked car into a battery on wheels - one that can push energy back to a building during peak-price hours or sit idle soaking up cheap midday sun. That is the difference between an EV as a cost and an EV as an asset. Burke's keywords read like a checklist of that ambition: peak shaving, demand response, smart load balancing, off-grid charging. None of them are possible if a fifth of the energy is already gone by the time it reaches the battery.
Enteligent has raised roughly $32.86 million to date, at a Series A stage, with a $6 million round in 2024 led by Taronga Ventures to scale commercialization. One of the more telling names on the cap table is NOVA, the venture affiliate of Saint-Gobain - a building-materials company that has been around for more than three centuries. When a firm that old backs a charger startup, it is usually because it sees the technology ending up embedded in buildings, not bolted on as an afterthought. That fits Burke's language about future-ready, solar-ready infrastructure: he wants the wiring designed for the sun from the start.
There is a pleasing symmetry to what Burke is doing. The current war of the 1890s was decided by transmission: AC could be stepped up to high voltage and pushed across long distances, and DC could not. That constraint built the grid we have. But rooftop solar does not transmit across a continent - it travels a few dozen feet from panel to battery. At that range, the old advantage of AC evaporates, and the native language of every modern component is DC. Burke is not trying to rerun the war. He is pointing out that on the short haul, in your driveway, the tie should go to physics.
He is careful not to oversell it. The AC grid is not going anywhere, and Enteligent's products are designed to live alongside it, not replace it. The company's whole posture is incremental in the best sense - a charger here, an optimizer there, each one clawing back a slice of energy that was being spent to accomplish nothing. Twenty percent at a time is not a revolution you notice on any single Tuesday. It is the kind that shows up on a fleet operator's annual report.
Solar makes DC. Batteries store DC. Cars run on DC. The only stubborn thing in the middle is a habit. The Enteligent thesis, in plain terms
Plenty of veteran executives coast into advisory roles and board seats. Burke started a hardware company - one of the harder second acts available, because atoms are less forgiving than software. Chargers have to survive weather, pass safety certifications, and work the first time in a customer's parking lot. His background is the tell: someone who has shipped notebooks and phones knows exactly how unglamorous and unforgiving physical products are, and chose to do it again anyway, this time pointed at decarbonization.
From an anonymous office in Morgan Hill, an hour south of San Francisco, the company is making a bet that the flashiest part of the energy transition - the panels, the sleek cars - has quietly left an inefficiency sitting in the wiring between them. If Burke is right, the next decade of clean-energy progress will be won not only by generating more sunlight, but by refusing to waste the sunlight already captured. It is an unglamorous idea. It is also, arguably, the whole game.