A Startup Fueled by Urgency
In the gleaming glass corridors of San Jose’s newest tech hub, 33-year-old Maya Brooks walks briskly past humming servers, solar arrays, and AI-powered control panels. She’s not a typical Silicon Valley founder — no Ivy League pedigree, no family VC connections — but she has something far more powerful: a world-changing idea and the tenacity to build it.
Brooks is the CEO and founder of Solarity, America’s fastest-growing climate tech startup, whose mission is as ambitious as it is urgent: decarbonize the U.S. grid using AI-optimized microgrids and real-time climate data analytics. In just under three years, Solarity has grown from a four-person garage experiment to a $1.6 billion powerhouse with contracts across 18 states and partnerships with NASA, the Department of Energy, and the United Nations.
“We don’t have time to wait,” Brooks says, her voice steady. “If we’re going to survive climate collapse, we need technology that doesn’t just adapt — it leads.”
From Flint to the Future: Maya Brooks’ Origin Story
Maya Brooks was born in Flint, Michigan, a city shaped by water crises, environmental neglect, and institutional failure. Her early years were marked by chronic asthma, protest marches, and a deep-rooted mistrust in systems meant to protect people.
“I watched my mother boil brown water to bathe my baby brother,” she recalls. “That’s when I realized the environment isn’t a distant issue. It’s personal.”
A scholarship to Howard University led her to study electrical engineering with a focus on renewable energy. She interned at Tesla and later joined NOAA, working on satellite-based climate monitoring. But bureaucracy frustrated her. By 29, she left her government job and moved to the Bay Area with a vision: build technology that could predict, prevent, and power communities against climate chaos.
The Birth of Solarity: A Garage, A Laptop, A Vision
In 2021, Maya launched Solarity with three friends: a data scientist, a former FEMA engineer, and a high school teacher. Their first product was a rudimentary solar-powered battery system combined with climate forecasting software designed to anticipate blackouts before they happened.
They tested it in low-income neighborhoods of Oakland prone to outages and wildfires. The prototype performed beyond expectations, providing consistent power, predictive alerts, and smart energy routing.
“It wasn’t just about clean energy,” Brooks explains. “It was about equitable energy — technology that works for people usually left out of the climate conversation.”
Word spread. So did funding.
The Breakthrough: Climate AI Meets Microgrids
By 2023, Solarity had developed its flagship platform: SolarNet, an AI-driven, modular energy system that connects solar panels, storage units, and grid interfaces into intelligent microgrids.
What makes SolarNet revolutionary is its predictive climate layer — an AI engine trained on decades of weather data, satellite imagery, infrastructure stress indicators, and even social media feeds. It can anticipate a heatwave, redirect energy before a flood, or self-isolate from a failing main grid during a wildfire.
Solarity’s systems are now deployed in:
- Texas to prevent repeat grid failures from winter storms.
- Arizona to support Indigenous communities facing energy poverty.
- Louisiana as part of FEMA’s post-hurricane disaster resilience strategy.
Funding, Scale, and the Unicorn Moment
Solarity’s first major infusion came in early 2023 with a $30 million Series A round led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, followed by a $100 million Series B that catapulted the company into the national spotlight.
In 2024, Maya was named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People, Forbes 30 Under 30 (Energy), and appeared on Bloomberg as one of the Top 10 Founders to Watch.
But perhaps the biggest moment came when Solarity secured a $250 million Department of Energy contract to install predictive microgrids across 200 critical infrastructure sites, including hospitals, shelters, and schools.
“This isn’t about unicorn valuation,” Brooks said during the announcement. “It’s about survival tech — and scaling solutions before it’s too late.”
Leadership and Legacy: Maya’s Radical Model
Maya Brooks is not your typical CEO. She turned down acquisition offers from Amazon and BP. Solarity’s board is 60% women and 40% people of color. The company shares 10% of its profits with frontline communities through a nonprofit arm called Solarity Justice Fund.
“Tech alone doesn’t fix inequality,” she says. “We need ethics embedded in our code and our companies.”
Her team culture is flat, inclusive, and purpose-driven. Every employee spends one week per quarter in the field — from installing panels in the Navajo Nation to training high schoolers in Detroit on climate data analysis.
Brooks also mentors other women founders and sponsors an annual Climate x Code Fellowship for underrepresented youth in STEM.
Challenges on the Horizon
Despite its meteoric rise, Solarity faces serious hurdles:
- Regulatory red tape, especially in conservative states where climate tech is politicized.
- Grid monopolies that resist decentralized models.
- Cybersecurity threats, with predictive energy systems becoming new targets for malicious actors.
- Climate unpredictability, which outpaces even the best AI.
Brooks is undeterred.
“We’re not naïve,” she says. “But we’re also not waiting for permission to act.”
The Bigger Picture: Building the Climate Tech Blueprint
Maya Brooks represents a new archetype: the mission-first technologist who blends science, justice, and entrepreneurship. In her hands, innovation is not a disruptor — it’s a healer.
Her vision of distributed, resilient, people-centered energy systems is now being adopted by cities like Chicago, Miami, and even international agencies in Indonesia and West Africa.
“The future won’t be centralized,” she says. “It’ll be local, intelligent, and just.”
Conclusion: Silicon Dreams, Grounded in Reality
As wildfires burn hotter, seas rise faster, and inequality deepens, the world urgently needs scalable, ethical, and transformative solutions. Maya Brooks, and the company she built from a Flint childhood and a Silicon Valley dream, may be one of the most promising answers.
She’s not building a tech empire — she’s building a climate infrastructure revolution. And in doing so, she’s reminding us that the most powerful innovation is not in lines of code, but in clear intention and collective impact.
“We don’t just need smarter machines,” she says. “We need smarter systems. And people brave enough to build them.”