Bo-Christopher Redfearn
Bo-Christopher Redfearn (known professionally as Bo) is a hardware validation engineer, robotics builder, and co-founder of Chargebotic, a startup building autonomous wireless charging infrastructure for robot fleets. He spent nearly a decade validating sensors, displays, and embedded systems at Meta, Cruise, and Apple before co-founding Chargebotic in December 2025 with Anis Cheriet, a former EV charging infrastructure executive.3 In April 2026 Redfearn joined Founders, Inc.'s Canopy Spring 2026 cohort at Fort Mason in San Francisco through Chargebotic.3
Early career and education
Redfearn earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from San Jose State University, graduating in December 2015, and participated in IEEE, the Minority Engineering Program (MEP), and the Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) during his studies.1 He completed the Introduction to Innovation and Entrepreneurship certificate at Stanford University School of Engineering in 2020–2021, and enrolled in a Master of Science in Computer Science program at Arizona State University in August 2024.1
His first hardware role was an electrical engineer internship at Velodyne Lidar in Morgan Hill, California, from July 2014 to January 2015, where he imported parts, created engineering change orders and bills of materials, and synchronized component libraries with database part numbers.1 After graduating, he joined Google in February 2016 as a PDM Analyst supporting the Cloud and Consumer Hardware teams, where he created Google Part Numbers and completed a database migration ahead of schedule.1 From July 2016 to May 2017 he was an Application Engineer at Camtek in Fremont, a semiconductor inspection equipment company, where he improved the performance of automated optical inspection tools by 25 percent, managed five U.S. client accounts, and traveled internationally approximately 70 percent of the time supporting pre-sales activity.1 From October 2017 to April 2018 he worked as a Test Technician at Molecular Devices in San Jose, validating robotics, lasers, sensors, and DNA sequencing platforms while managing communication across a team of three to four testing electro-mechanical systems.1
Meta (first tenure, 2018–2020)
Redfearn joined Meta's Menlo Park facility in June 2018 as an Optical Lab Technician, remaining until August 2020. He defined test plans and implemented test setups for AR/VR hardware prototypes covering PCBs, electrical components, cameras, lasers, and optical elements. He developed MATLAB data acquisition applications linked to network analyzers, spectrum analyzers, oscilloscopes, and power meters, and was responsible for prototype electrical bring-up and firmware verification.1
Johnson & Johnson (2021)
Between January 2021 and January 2022 Redfearn worked as a Test Technician at Johnson & Johnson, first in Santa Clara and then continuing through a second contract. The work covered PCBA bring-up, troubleshooting, and firmware verification for bench-level testing. He validated automated tests for robotics, sensors, and complex medical device systems, constructed and verified the functionality of motors, designed test fixtures, and produced root cause analysis reports at the component and board level. He also managed Linux servers via command-line interface and SSH.1
Meta (second tenure, 2022–2025)
Redfearn returned to Meta in January 2022 as an Optical Engineer II in Sunnyvale, a position he held until January 2024. He developed Python applications and automation scripts for hardware testing and data collection on sensor systems, authored and executed automation test protocols, and integrated Python tools into internal ground-truth testing and external manufacturing workflows for OLED and LCD displays. He conducted accelerated life testing on LCD and OLED displays.1
In December 2024 he took a short contract as a Hardware Display Test Engineer at Meta, running through January 2025. During this assignment he acted as lab manager leading a team of three, implemented an inventory tracking system that improved asset management efficiency by 20 percent, and operated function generators, spectrum analyzers, thermal chambers, and photospectrometers for display performance validation.1
Cruise (2024)
Between July and November 2024 Redfearn worked as a Senior Engineer at Cruise in San Francisco. He managed electrical engineering testing on LiDAR and camera sensors, delegated lab space to engineering teams, tested audio sensors in thermal chambers and anechoic chambers, and assisted with off-site data collection for long-range LiDAR systems using a Leica ground-truth measuring device. He also served as acting lab manager tracking and calibrating millions of dollars of lab assets.1
Apple (2025–present)
In April 2025 Redfearn began a contract as a Hardware Validation Engineer at Apple in Cupertino. He performs electrical validation on consumer devices, evaluating touch-sensor behavior and impedance characteristics across power and accessory conditions, designs and integrates custom test hardware including PCBs for electrical characterization, and develops automated test systems using Python-based automation.1
Public recognition and writing
In May 2025, Fierce Electronics announced the inaugural Fierce Electronics 40 Under 40 in partnership with Sensors Converge, recognizing 40 professionals under 40 for contributions across semiconductors, IoT, AI, sensors, and embedded systems.6 Redfearn was listed at age 30, identified as a Hardware Test Engineer at Apple.5 The full class was honored at Sensors Converge 2025, the conference's 40th anniversary, at the Santa Clara Convention Center June 24–26, 2025.7
On June 25, 2025, Redfearn delivered a technical session at Sensors Converge 2025 titled "Advancing Autonomous Vehicle Sensors: Testing Lidar Cameras and Multi Sensor Systems," a 20-minute presentation in the Advancements in Auto Tech track held in the Great America 2 hall.8 The session covered validation methods for LiDAR, cameras, and multi-sensor arrays, sensor integration challenges, and approaches to maintaining data accuracy across varied environmental conditions.8
In 2026, AllSpice.io named Redfearn to its 50 Hardware Innovators list, describing his work as building scalable hardware validation systems combining precision electronics, mechanical design, and software automation, with experience in cameras, LiDAR, and embedded systems for autonomous platforms.9
Redfearn maintains a technical blog, "Notes from the Lab," at his personal website. A post from October 2025 describes a prototype system he built on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano that generates SHA-256 hashes for each camera frame, timestamps them at acquisition, and chains them sequentially to produce a tamper-evident log of sensor data — an approach he calls cryptographic sensor data provenance.10 The open-source implementation, titled hash-chaining-camera, is published on GitHub.10 Earlier posts from June 2025 address narrative communication in engineering practice and lessons from testing LiDAR and audio sensors in harsh environments.12
Chargebotic
Redfearn co-founded Chargebotic in December 2025 alongside Anis Cheriet.3 The company's founding problem is that robot fleets lose 30 percent of productive operating time to charging, charging infrastructure costs exceed robot costs at scale, and every hardware vendor operates a siloed charging solution incompatible with other fleets.3
The initial concept originated from a lunar scenario the team identified in early December 2025: a $100 million rover dies within 14 days on the Moon because energy infrastructure is absent, and solar panels fail during the lunar night at temperatures reaching -173°C.3 The team researched charging methods suitable for space and identified induction — wireless charging using copper coils — as the correct approach because it requires no connectors that can jam with regolith dust and no moving parts.3 They designed the Lunar Energy Node (LEN) concept: small deployable charging modules buried in regolith for thermal protection, forming a mesh network with AI-assisted routing.3 They subsequently designed the LEN-P, a rugged cylindrical battery with a wireless charging dock, 1–2 kWh storage, shock absorbers, thermal management, and ground-penetration anchoring, engineered to survive ballistic delivery.3
In January 2026 the team pivoted from lunar to terrestrial applications to validate the core charging technology in accessible conditions. Redfearn built Spark-E from scratch: a mecanum-wheel rover running on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano, with LiDAR, an OAK-D Lite depth camera, an IMU, ultrasonic sensors, and wheel encoders.4 The first autonomous charging demonstration used a conductive pad: Spark-E detects an ArUco marker on the pad, navigates to it, docks, and charges without human intervention.3
In February 2026 Redfearn built the induction charging system, scaling from 5W to 100W using custom 3D-printed enclosures with copper coils.4 The navigation system was extended into a charging orchestration layer: Spark-E detects low battery, routes to the nearest charger, docks, charges, and resumes its mission autonomously.3 By February 2026 — three months after founding — the full Chargebotic V1 stack was operational: mecanum-wheel robot, LiDAR, depth camera, induction charging station, autonomous navigation, and charging orchestration running end-to-end.34
Redfearn described the technical insight behind the company in April 2026: "from working on this, autonomy breaks down at energy logistics, not intelligence."11 Chargebotic's target verticals include warehouse and factory autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), drone and UAV fleets, last-mile delivery robots, humanoid robots, and industrial outdoor systems in construction, agriculture, and mining, with the long-term lunar application remaining part of the company's stated roadmap.3
Chargebotic joined Founders, Inc.'s Canopy Spring 2026 cohort, which began April 15, 2026, at Fort Mason in San Francisco — the first Canopy cohort to include an online track alongside in-person building.3
References
- Christopher Redfearn — LinkedIn Profile(accessed Apr 24, 2026)
- Bo-Christopher Redfearn — Engineer. Speaker. Builder.(accessed Apr 24, 2026)
- Chargebotic — Universal Energy for Autonomous Robots(accessed Apr 24, 2026)
- Chargebotic — What We've Built(accessed Apr 24, 2026)
- Final group: Fierce Electronics 40 Under 40 — Fierce Sensors