Richard Swartwout came out of MIT with a thesis: that solar technology should be lighter, more flexible, and deployable in places traditional panels can’t go. As CTO and Founder of Active Surfaces, he’s spent the years since making that real, building ultra-lightweight, flexible solar modules that install where conventional solar can’t.
The connection to disaster resilience came directly out of that mission.
“Pretty much everything you ever need in a disaster relies on energy. And the faster you can get the energy system online, the better.”
Richard Swartwout, CTO and Founder of Active Surfaces
The team’s framing of the problem is direct. The three things people need most in a disaster are energy, water, and communications. Two of those three depend almost entirely on the first one.
“You can roll that solar panel up kind of like a yoga mat,” Swartwout says. “If you put it in the back of a flatbed truck, you can actually deliver an entire neighborhood’s worth of power.”
Active Surfaces’ modules install where conventional solar can’t: on structures that couldn’t bear the weight of standard panels, on surfaces that don’t fit the geometry of typical mounting hardware, in locations a rooftop installation crew couldn’t reach in the aftermath of a storm. The modules are thin enough to roll up, durable enough to deploy rapidly, and scalable enough that a single truck can carry enough generating capacity to restore power to an entire neighborhood.
In disaster response, that changes the calculus significantly. Conventional recovery depends on getting diesel fuel to generators, a supply chain that tends to break down precisely when and where it’s needed most. Distributed solar doesn’t have that dependency. Once it’s deployed, it generates. The faster generating assets reach a disaster zone, the faster everything downstream, cell service, water treatment, emergency communications, and hospital backup power, comes back online.
For Swartwout, the connection between energy and connectivity is the whole thesis. “Energy and communications are tied together,” he says. “Fundamentally, communications resilience also requires energy resilience.”
That’s the connection that brought Active Surfaces into the Verizon partnership. A cell tower with no power is infrastructure that exists only on paper. Active Surfaces’ technology extends battery runtime for critical systems, keeps communications infrastructure running longer, and opens up deployment scenarios that weren’t possible with heavier, less flexible generating equipment.
Swartwout describes his end goal in plain terms: to develop solar technologies that are rapidly deployable and really save lives.
Active Surfaces is one of seven startups selected for the 2026 Verizon Community Disaster Resilience Innovation Accelerator, powered by MassChallenge. The program provides access to Verizon’s technical expertise, 5G infrastructure, and a network of industry leaders working on the hardest problems in community resilience.
Inside the Program
This video is one of nine in our Video Impact Series for the Verizon Community Disaster Resilience Innovation Accelerator program, featuring. Watch the full series here: Video Series – Verizon Community Disaster Resilience Innovation Accelerator.