There’s a reason why New York has been coined “the city that never sleeps.” The city’s energy, both human and electrical, never subsides. So perhaps it’s fitting that a kid who grew up in a city brimming with so much electricity is on a mission to bring “energy everywhere.” And that’s just what Jonathan Cedar set out to do in 2009 when he co-founded BioLite, an Acumen investee committed to bringing energy to the 1.2 billion people living in darkness through smart, sustainable design.

Tackling one of the world’s biggest challenges, however, wasn’t always on Jonathan’s radar. In 2006, he was working at Smart Design, a design and innovation firm, where he met BioLite’s co-founder Alec Drummond. The two men quickly bonded over a mutual love for sustainable, problem-driven design and the great outdoors. Both avid campers, Jonathan and Alec became frustrated with the inefficiency of camping stoves and all that was required just to keep a fire burning out in the wild. They sought to create a cook stove that wouldn’t require heavy, fossil-fuel canisters but instead could burn the wood around them as cleanly and efficiently as gas. After months of tinkering, they had come up with a solution: a highly innovative, nearly smokeless wood-burning stove that generates electricity from the heat of its fire.

But it wasn’t until Jonathan and Alec began to dig deeper into the world of clean cooking that they discovered the need for smart, renewable energy extended far beyond the campsite into every corner of the developing world. “It shocked us that half the planet was still cooking on smoky wood fires and that the emissions from these inefficient fires were killing more people than HIV, Malaria, and Tuberculosis combined,” Jonathan said.

“For the first time, we had our eyes opened to this problem and started thinking this isn’t just a nights-and-weekends project anymore — this is important. We had this amazing confluence — not only did we have an important purpose behind our project, but we had created something that could really move the needle.”

Jonathan and Alec quit their jobs and spent the next few years learning what it was like to truly live off the grid. They studied the journey of Acumen’s first energy investment, d.light, a social enterprise that has great success in bringing energy to the poor, and Jonathan spent a year in India incubating his and Alec’s designs with Dasra, a strategic philanthropy foundation that supports social enterprises. It was here where he first experienced began to fully understand the needs and behaviors of low-income customers. “I’ve always been of the personal opinion that people make decisions very similarly, regardless of who they are or whether they’re from New York or Bhubaneswar,” Jonathan said. “When I left India, I knew that whatever we created would have to not only address the health risks caused by cooking over an open fire but also the customers’ needs while feeling both aspirational and ownable. We wanted our customers to see the benefits of our products and feel proud to own them.”

The scale of the energy problem was evident, but so was the number of failed attempts to deliver real, lasting solutions to the poor. Nobody had been able to figure out how to develop clean, high-quality stoves for low-income consumers at scale. In the past, governments and aid agencies distributed stoves that were hardly used due to their inferior quality or ineffective design that didn’t take into account the poor’s actual, everyday needs. Small, private enterprises had failed to attract the capital needed to create high-quality products to sell at scale.

Where current models focused on efficiency, Jonathan and Alec put their resources into developing a higher technology and more advanced design. They had figured out that by injecting air into specific points of a wood fire, they could improve combustion and turn a rudimentary fuel in a hot, clean and controllable combustion process. Their inventive design, which eventually became the BioLite HomeStove, features a thermoelectric generator that creates both a smokeless fire while generating two watts of electrical energy, allowing low-income users to charge mobile phones and LED lights all from the heat of their cooking fires. This kind of stove would cost more to make, but it had the ability to serve the needs of the nearly three billion people without clean cooking facilities and provide the extra benefit of usable electricity which, for millions of potential users, was a critical connection in keeping mobile phones charged.

To make a meaningful dent in such a gigantic problem, Jonathan and Alec decided BioLite would have to be a social enterprise. They knew there weren’t enough philanthropic dollars in the world to take on energy poverty and that, while popular, “Buy One, Give One” models like TOMS Shoes failed to create sustainable solutions. They would create a new kind of business driven by their mission to bring energy everywhere but equipped to substantially scale. Jonathan and Alec saw an opportunity to support their mission by developing two suites of products: one designed to serve the poor and the other designed to address the needs of outdoor enthusiasts, the very reason they created the flagship technology in the first place. As they began to understand the synergies between their customers in both the emerging and recreational markets, BioLite’s unique business model — what Jonathan and Alec call “parallel innovation” — began to take shape.

“Parallel innovation is the process of investing deeply in core technologies and then commercializing them for emerging markets for long-term impact and for recreational markets to generate near-term revenue,” Jonathan said. “We then reinvest those revenues into our emerging markets, so we’re essentially our own internal investment vehicle. We’re incubating our own business, so we can scale and solve this problem.”

The beauty of parallel innovation is in how the two businesses mutually reinforce each other. BioLite sells clean cooking and energy solutions to both outdoor enthusiasts in the United States and low-income customers living off the grid in India and East Africa. The company’s success in the recreational markets helps BioLite weather the storm of building a sustainable business in some of the toughest markets in the world. The clean cooking products for each market share the same core thermoelectric technology, but the product designs are customized — and priced — for the different needs of each customer segment. That way, the Indian woman in rural Madhya Pradesh can purchase a BioLite HomeStove for roughly $50 to cook her roti without putting her family’s health at risk while a group of rock climbers, who’ve purchased the company’s CampStove for $129.95, won’t run out of fuel deep in the granite valleys of Yosemite. Together, the businesses are helping BioLite empower the poor to power themselves through smart, affordable energy solutions while building a powerful brand and a devoted community of recreational customers who value the company’s greater mission.

Acumen invested $1 million in BioLite in 2015 to scale up marketing and distribution of the HomeStove, the company’s flagship product for off-grid communities in India, Kenya and Uganda. The stove uses 50 percent less fuel and reduces toxic emissions by 90 percent compared to traditional open fire cooking, saving users time and money and dramatically reducing the amount of smoked inhaled during the cooking process. The stove also generates enough electricity to power small appliances such as cell phones and solar lights, an added benefit to people who don’t have access to power.

While it’s still early in the company’s operations in emerging markets — 2015 was the first full year of commercial operations — the early benefits of BioLite’s parallel innovation are starting to show. With more than 50,000 people benefitting from the smoke-free cooking of the HomeStove and more than 170,000 customers supporting the company through the purchase of recreational markets products, Jonathan Cedar and BioLite are well on their way to bringing energy everywhere.

“We’ve always seen energy as an ecosystem,” Jonathan said. “It’s the power that keeps us safe, comfortable, productive, entertained and connected. What I’m really excited about is that we’re building an organization that can take this ecosystem view of energy, find the synergies and look at it as a holistic problem. Since day one, BioLite has been a global energy access company, and I’m the excited for the day when we can give you a cook stove, charge your phone, and power your entire home. We’re thinking of a new kind of grid designed and owned by the individual.”