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Our Story

The name nLine pays homage to a common technique used to evaluate the impact of interventions, where one-time pre-intervention “baseline”, mid-intervention “midline”, and post-intervention “endline” measurements are taken. Outside of these infrequent and discrete measurement windows, information is rarely collected.

Borrowing our italic n from the common notation for sample size, the name nLine demonstrates the measurement methodology that sets us apart. At nLine we actually provide our customers an “nLine,” a continuous data stream. Rather than depending on infrequent and discrete studies, our continuous measurements enable key stakeholders to understand and improve continuously changing critical infrastructure systems.

Our team started in the Electrical Engineering department at the University of California, Berkeley where co-founders Noah Klugman and Josh Adkins met while working towards Ph.D.’s as members of third nLine co-founder Prabal Dutta’s group, Lab11. Since formation in late 2019, nLine is thrilled to have grown, adding new team members from around the world!

Our Mission and Values

nLine’s mission is to measure and improve the performance of critical infrastructure in order to meet the needs of all people and support sustainable, inclusive economic development.

We believe reliable critical infrastructure is a fundamental human right.

We understand a major impediment to equality of service to be the limited and unequal availability of information on the performance of complex, critical, life-sustaining systems like water, energy, and transportation infrastructure.

We seek to rapidly collect missing data before an investment is planned, to determine whether improvements achieve their promised impact, to help utilities place operational resources, and to assist governments in more effectively regulating infrastructure performance, among many other use cases.

We are inspired by concepts of justice that call for even access to the benefits of modern systems, inclusionary decision making, and open access to information.

We are motivated by the close relationship between performance and economic sustainability, in which measurement, analysis, and iteration increase the human benefits of a system while also increasing demand and profit.

We envision providing actionable, high-frequency, high-accuracy insights about the performance of any critical infrastructure system anywhere on earth. We do our work in the open, where anyone can easily audit and understand our methodology, ensuring our findings are fair and accurate across cultural and economic contexts.

Our Current Focus

“Energy is the golden thread that connects economic growth, increased social equity, and an environment that allows the world to thrive.” - Former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

nLine is currently working to improve the reliability of electricity distribution in Sub-Saharan Africa, where power outages are common and repairs are slow. Frequent outages have human consequences, leading to families not realizing the full benefits of electrification, small businesses struggling to operate efficiently, and governments not able to regulate effectively.

We design sensors and cloud services to determine when the grid fails and why it fails, and we report what we learn back to utilities, regulators, donors, and the public. nLine provides an independent power quality monitoring solution that can be deployed quickly, for variable lengths of time, and operate either in collaboration with or independently from utility companies. We are currently working in partnership with utilities, donors, and research institutions to quantify power reliability in Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria.

Read more about our technology solution here.