This Clean Energy CEO Reveals How She Took a Google Project Using Old Tech and Turned It Into a Startup That's Raised $87M Malta solves a huge obstacle for wind and solar energy, and creates jobs for communities impacted by the energy transition. But, as the CEO shares, while the mission is clear, the startup's journey has been far from smooth sailing.

Ramya Swaminathan has never taken the act of flipping on the light for granted. Growing up between India and the Philippines, her family lived in cities with fragile electric grids, and she often had to plan around energy outages.

"We were in urban areas that still experience electricity insecurity," she said. "I remember being in high school and having six to eight hours of power cuts a day. We had to choose when we studied to make sure we had electricity, and that became an internalized decision every day. So the motivation for me to work on really tough problems with electricity is fundamentally connected to human wellbeing for societies everywhere."

Swaminathan is now the CEO of Malta, a Cambridge, MA-based startup that spun out from Google X, or, the "moonshot factory," in 2018. It has since raised $86.9 million.