BioLite

BioLite acquired Goal Zero from NRG Energy on April 15, 2025, combining two clean-energy hardware brands under a single CEO (Jonathan Cedar). Goal Zero retained its Salt Lake City HQ and engineering team. Both brands continue to ship — BioLite on cookstoves, FirePits, and BaseCharge; Goal Zero on portable-power and home-backup systems.

My remit broadened with the acquisition: keep Goal Zero’s connected-product cloud running, and build the applied-AI practice across the combined org.

I focus on high-leverage AI work — places where an LLM-backed tool replaces an hour of expert time per use, and we use it dozens of times a week.

• AI-powered internal tools — purpose-built assistants serving engineering, product, and operations.
• Retrieval-augmented knowledge bases over architecture docs, runbooks, and historical decisions, so engineers can ask natural-language questions instead of paging humans.
• AI synthesis pipelines that aggregate AWS telemetry, GitHub activity, and operational signal into weekly digests for engineering leadership.
• AI-accelerated SDLC — code review, firmware optimization, and refactor-at-scale workflows used across the team.
• The underlying plumbing: AWS Lambda, IoT Core, SNS, DynamoDB, S3, API Gateway, Serverless Framework.

Cycle time on “track down the right context” tasks is down measurably for new engineers and cross-team questions. CI/CD work cut deployment time by ~65%. Per-engineer output across the team is meaningfully higher with AI-assisted workflows in the loop.

BioLite continues to ship its FirePit+, BaseCharge, and HomeStove lines, alongside its Africa-market cookstove distribution under the Parallel Innovation model — selling efficient cookstoves at scale to households still cooking on open fires. The combined org keeps both brands distinct in market.