
A high-school dropout taught himself electromagnetics, helped rethink the electric drivetrain, and spent decades learning one stubborn lesson: reliable power is a systems problem.

A lesson about 30 seconds on a factory line led Ben Schuler toward a much larger question: what if the ordinary motor could do more with less material, power and waste?

Nick Grewal is the founder, chairman and CEO of ePropelled, a Laconia, New Hampshire company building smart-propulsion and energy-management systems for drones, marine craft, and light electric vehicles. He founded ePropelled in 2018 after selling his previous startup Nashoba Networks to Cisco Systems for roughly $100 million in 1996 and spending two decades as an angel investor in more than 40 high-tech companies. He was inducted into the 2025 Boston Smart Business Dealmakers Hall of Fame.