Nicole González

Nicole González was helping solve problems millions of miles from Earth when a crisis back home changed the direction of her life.

In September 2017, Gonzalez was working at NASA helping keep a rover operating on Mars, when Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico. For two weeks, she was unable to reach her family on the island. The silence left her with a question she couldn’t shake: How could engineers figure out how to power technology on Mars for years while families on Earth could be left without electricity?

A year later, while driving through Puerto Rico’s mountains, she passed a hand-painted sign that read, “365 days without power and counting.” For González, the challenge had become deeply personal.

© Courtesy

By then, she had already built an impressive engineering career. After earning her undergraduate engineering degree from Princeton University, González worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory before completing a master’s in Design Impact Engineering at Stanford University. Her work later took her to East Africa, where she designed solar projects and saw how renewable energy could reach communities underserved by traditional infrastructure.

Those experiences eventually led to Raya Power, the company Gonzalez co-founded with CEO Meghan Wood. As CTO, she is applying years of engineering expertise to a deceptively simple goal: making reliable backup energy easier for more families to access.

Raya’s plug-and-play solar-and-battery pods offer an alternative for households that may not be able to install traditional rooftop solar. The system connects between an outlet and an appliance, charges during the day and can automatically switch to battery power during an outage. That can mean keeping a refrigerator cold, a router connected or another essential appliance running when the grid goes down.

© Ivan Apfel

The company has deployed pilot units in Puerto Rico and California and raised $1 million in pre-seed funding, including investment from Banco Popular.

In 2026, González reached another major milestone when she became one of the first fellows selected as the Bravo Family Foundation’s Venture Fellowship expanded beyond Puerto Rico. The recognition connects Gonzalez, who has described herself as “a Boricua living in the diaspora,” with a network of founders and mentors as Raya prepares for its next stage of commercial growth.

Nearly a decade after Hurricane Maria forced Gonzalez to question where our greatest engineering ambitions are directed, she is helping redefine what innovation can look like when it begins with a community’s needs.

Nicole once helped keep a rover running on Mars. Now, she is using that same spirit of ingenuity to build a more resilient future for Puerto Rico.