When Power Goes Mobile

Investors are drowning in decks about AI, blockchain, and data centres. Ambient power tackles a simpler, more universal problem: the wires, batteries, and maintenance burden that keep small devices from being truly mobile.

Disclosure: Ossia Arabia is a Saudi-based firm building the wireless power backbone of Saudi Arabia’s emerging digital infrastructure. This enables sensors, environmental monitors, thermostats, and control systems to run reliably at scale, reducing maintenance, simplifying deployment, and unlocking always-on intelligent environments. 1648 Capital holds a minority stake in Ossia Arabia, has board representation, and advises the company.

There is a familiar rhythm to technology capital now. Every week brings another immaculate deck promising that AI will remake labour, data centres will underwrite the next industrial age, or some new digital architecture will rewire trust, ownership, or intelligence. The graphics improve, the claims get wilder, and the underlying investment case often still feels like a Hail Mary.

Ambient power feels different because it starts with a problem that is older, simpler, and instantly legible. Nobody likes wires or hunting for chargers. Nobody likes batteries either. Mobility tied to a countdown timer is only marginally better. Modern buildings are full of small devices that are supposed to feel seamless and intelligent, yet far too many remain tethered to cables, locked into awkward placements, or condemned to a quiet afterlife of battery swaps, maintenance rounds, and avoidable waste.

That is what makes ambient power interesting. Not as science fiction. Not as another abstract technology stack. But as a serious attempt to make power behave more like connectivity: available where it is needed, less visible, less fixed, and less dependent on constant intervention.

The promise is easy to caricature. For years, wireless power has been marketed as a kind of technological magic trick, a future in which devices charge across a room and cables disappear into history. That vision is seductive and, in some cases, distracting. The real commercial opportunity is less theatrical and more powerful. It sits in the mundane corners of everyday operations: sensors in ceilings, displays on glass, locks on doors, remotes in hotel rooms, shelf labels in retail, and low-power devices scattered across buildings and infrastructure. These are not glamorous objects. They are precisely the kind of objects that create operational drag when they rely on wiring or batteries.

At that point, the economics start to matter. A battery is not just a battery. At scale, it is a maintenance regime. It is labour. It is access. It is downtime. It is landfill. It is the cost of sending someone to service a device that should never have needed attention in the first place. Wiring brings its own burdens: less flexibility, uglier integration, higher fit-out cost, and the familiar compromise of putting devices where power is convenient rather than where they are most useful. Ambient power is compelling because it attacks that whole bundle at once.

This is also why the category is often misunderstood. Many people still talk about wireless power as though it were one market waiting for one universal breakthrough. It is not. One part of wireless power has already won. Near-field charging is mainstream, boring, and deeply embedded in consumer electronics. The more radical frontier is power at a distance: useful energy delivered over the air to devices that are not sitting obediently on a pad or dock. That is the category that still feels open, and it is a much harsher test. The challenge is not proving the physics in a demo. The challenge is proving that the system is safe, certifiable, reliable, affordable, and worth buying in the real world.

That is where the analogy to early mobile phones becomes useful. The first mobile phones were already extraordinary. They just were not yet ubiquitous. Coverage was patchy. Devices were clumsy. Costs were high. Standards were unsettled. The capability existed before the market was truly ready for it. Ambient power now sits in the same kind of gap. The underlying feat is no longer the whole story. What matters now is whether the technology can shrink, standardise, integrate, and become routine.

This is not, in other words, simply a patent story.

Patents matter, of course. Deeply. In a frontier category, intellectual property helps determine who has freedom to operate, who has leverage in licensing, and who has a chance of protecting the architecture if the market finally turns. But patents do not commercialise themselves. History is full of companies with elegant IP and weak businesses. The hard part is not filing the claim. The hard part is turning protected science into standards, approvals, products, unit economics, channels, and customer trust. Patents are the deed, not the development.

That distinction matters especially in this field, because the competitive set is much thinner than the market’s rhetoric suggests. There are still credible players, but not a crowded parade of scaled winners. Some companies have survived because they kept going long after the hype passed. Some remain alive largely because they protected enough IP to keep the story going. Some are building genuine footholds in narrow applications. The point is not that the category has gone quiet. It is that it has moved into its harder phase: the stage at which only a few serious contenders remain and the questions get less philosophical and more operational.

That is why the most meaningful progress in ambient power does not come from showmanship. It comes from the slow construction of an ecosystem. Standards. Certification. Testing. Integrators who trust the hardware. Buyers who understand what problem is being solved. Manufacturers who can build at sensible cost. Installers who no longer treat the technology as exotic. This phase is less exciting to read about and vastly more important.

The mistake many investors make is to keep looking for the consumer-electronics epiphany, the single dazzling moment when the market suddenly understands everything. That may never come. The first real breakout is far more likely to happen in controlled, managed environments where the economics are visible and the operational pain is already well understood. Hotels. Offices. Retail. Warehouses. Mixed-use districts. Sales suites.

Commercial infrastructure. Environments full of low-power endpoints and constant pressure to reduce cost, improve uptime, clean up design, and make systems more intelligent without making them more cumbersome.

That is the part of the story that matters most for Ossia Arabia.

For a Saudi-based platform with exclusive access to Ossia Inc.’s patent portfolio, the real question is not whether wireless power can become the next mass-market gadget craze. It is whether it can become a useful infrastructure layer inside the Kingdom’s built environment. That is a very different lens, and a far more serious one. Saudi Arabia is building and upgrading large, managed environments on a scale few markets can match. Hospitality, retail, commercial real estate, smart buildings, district infrastructure, and higher-specification development formats all create the same demand pattern: more sensors, more control systems, more need for data, less appetite for wires, less tolerance for visible clutter, and less patience for endless maintenance loops.

In those environments, ambient power does not need to sound magical. It only needs to sound rational.

Take hospitality. The dream is not some futuristic hotel room that charges everything in sight. The real value is subtler, and more investable: devices that do not keep failing quietly in the background, fewer maintenance interventions, cleaner room design, more flexible placement of controls and sensors, and an operating model less dependent on battery replacement. The same logic applies in retail, where shelf-edge systems, smart displays, and small connected devices are only as clever as the maintenance burden they create. And it applies in offices and mixed-use developments, where the promise of smart buildings often runs into the dull reality that intelligence still has to be wired, serviced, and paid for.

That is why ambient power should be thought of not as a gadget story, but as a built-environment story. The devices matter, but the setting matters more. Managed spaces reward technologies that remove friction across portfolios, not just across single products. Once that is understood, the category looks less like a speculative consumer bet and more like a new layer of building infrastructure, one that sits somewhere between connectivity, controls, and energy distribution.

This is also where 1648 Capital’s vantage point matters. As a minority shareholder, board representative, and advisor to Ossia Arabia, 1648 is not approaching wireless power as a novelty. It is approaching it as an infrastructure and commercialisation problem. That means asking harder questions than the market usually asks: not simply whether the technology works, but where it works first, under what conditions, with what unit economics, through which partners, into which environments, and with what repeatability.

That is the right discipline for this category, because ambient power does not win by looking futuristic. It wins when it becomes easier to specify than the incumbent mess of batteries, wires, chargers, and service visits. It wins when the buyer does not need to be evangelised. It wins when the installer no longer sees it as unusual. It wins when portfolio economics overwhelm first-impression scepticism.

The battery question, especially around solid-state, does not change that. Better batteries will absolutely improve some consumer experiences and may blunt some of the more inflated use cases for wireless power. But they do much less to solve the central problem in dense, managed environments: the cost and inconvenience of maintaining thousands of low-power devices scattered across walls, ceilings, doors, shelves, and fixtures. Better batteries are not irrelevant. They simply do not eliminate the case for mobile power where maintenance, design freedom, and system flexibility are the true prize.

The next big thing, then, may not be another software layer, another compute narrative, or another deck promising to virtualise the world. It may be something more basic and more durable: power that finally learns to move.

Not everywhere. Not all at once. But first in the places where wires are ugly, batteries are wasteful, and intelligence is only useful if it stays alive.

That is how ambient power grows up. Not by dazzling the market one more time, but by quietly becoming too practical to ignore.

By Louay Aldoory

Louay Aldoory is the Founder at 1648 Capital. 1648 Capital is a corporate advisory and private markets platform partnering with founders, shareholders, and investors on complex growth, restructuring, and capital structuring initiatives. We combine strategic insight with execution discipline, supporting businesses from transformation through to institutional capital alignment.

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