Bob Marshall is the Co-Founder and CEO of Whisker Labs, where he leads the development of cutting-edge sensor technology that protects families, homes, and communities by predicting and preventing electrical fires while also advancing the resiliency and safety of the U.S. electrical grid.

A passionate entrepreneur and technologist, Bob is the co-inventor of Ting, Whisker Labs’ flagship solution. Ting leverages decades of expertise in electromagnetic and atmospheric sensors combined with AI to detect electrical faults both inside homes and across the grid. Now deployed to millions of homes across the U.S., Ting has been proven to prevent more than 80% of home electrical fires while also detecting dangerous grid faults that can spark community-wide wildfires and outages.

Ting provides an unprecedented view of grid behavior, helping prevent fires, identify hidden risks, accelerate outage detection, and ultimately improve the safety, quality, and reliability of power for everyone.

Prior to founding Whisker Labs, Bob co-founded Earth Networks, where he built and scaled the world’s largest weather and climate sensor networks, delivering critical environmental insights on a global scale. His career is marked by a track record of identifying hard problems, extracting meaningful signals from vast datasets, and turning innovative technologies into impactful, customer-focused businesses.

Your recent partnership with Adaptive Insurance marks a first in using real-time grid data for parametric outage insurance. Can you walk us through what makes this a watershed moment for both companies?

Our partnership with Adaptive is groundbreaking because it is the first time real-time grid data is being used to trigger parametric insurance for power outages. Traditionally, insurance relies on claims processes after the fact, which are slow, manual, and often contentious. With the hyper-local grid intelligence that Ting Insights provides, outages can be detected in milliseconds with precision down to the neighborhood and even the home or business.

Adaptive Insurance can now deliver instant, data-verified coverage to customers when the lights go out. This creates trust, speed, and resilience for policyholders, while also proving the broader value of Ting Insights as a financial-grade signal for the grid.

Ting began as electrical fire prevention for homes. How did it evolve into a hyper-local grid intelligence platform?

Ting began with a mission to stop electrical fires before they start, monitoring the health of a home’s wiring and appliances. As we scaled, we discovered that the same technology could also reveal what was happening outside the home on the electric utility grid, from transmission down to distribution. By synchronizing sensors across the country, Ting grew into a distributed intelligence network, capable of detecting and analyzing grid events in real time. What started as protecting individual families evolved into grid-scale visibility, with Ting serving as both a guardian of the home and a sentinel of the grid.

Ting is now in over one million homes across the U.S. How did you reach that scale, and what opportunities does it create to improve safety, resilience and overall grid visibility?

We reached this milestone largely by partnering with over 30 leading insurance carriers who have documented Ting’s ability to prevent devastating electrical fires and the resulting insurance claims. Our insurance partners are moving to a future of “predict and prevent” to protect customers instead of only dealing with loss, recovery, and replacement. They provide Ting free to their customers because of the proven loss prevention benefits, and customers deeply value this protection.

The Ting network is growing at about 50,000 new homes per month, making it one of the fastest-growing IoT networks of all time. This scale creates a virtuous cycle: every new home improves the network’s ability to detect, learn, and predict. With over a million sensors, Ting provides an unprecedented view of grid behavior, helping prevent fires, identify hidden risks, accelerate outage detection, and ultimately improve the safety, quality, and reliability of power for everyone. We are also hopeful that the Ting network will help prevent catastrophic wildfires that were likely grid-caused like those that have occurred in Maui and Los Angeles.

Ting Insights analyzes trillions of precise measurements every second – what begins as signals from individual sensors becomes a distributed, intelligent system for the grid. What’s the most surprising or unexpected insight you’ve uncovered about grid health from that data?

One of the most surprising discoveries is that the safety, quality, and reliability of power across the country vary widely, and often depend on the operator of the local electric utility. Ting Insights also confirms a growing concern: our grid is showing increased signs of stress, with frequent safety problems, power quality issues, and reliability challenges. This is likely driven by the rising demands of electrification and the growing complexity of integrating distributed solar, wind, EVs, and battery storage. The reality is our grid was never designed for the demands of today.

For example, the rapid growth of data centers is adding significant stress to local grids. Ting data shows an increasing presence of damaging harmonics, which cost homeowners money through appliance failures and reduced energy efficiency. We also see that certain communities experience anywhere from 10 to 30 times the frequency of surges and outages compared to the average. Finally, Ting documented clear signs of grid stress for many hours prior to the ignition of the devastating wildfires in Maui and Los Angeles.

Beyond insurance, how are integrations with partners like RapidSOS for first responders and Flat for home management expanding the impact of Ting Insights?

Insurance was the first natural fit, but Ting’s intelligence also supports public safety and smart home ecosystems. With RapidSOS, our signals help first responders act faster, reducing risk when electrical fires, grid failures, wildfires, or outages threaten lives. With Flat and other home management platforms, Ting becomes a guardian of both safety and efficiency, helping homeowners proactively manage energy risk. These integrations demonstrate Ting’s flexibility as a data platform, strengthening partners’ missions while expanding the real-world impact on safety, resilience, and quality of life.

Where are the biggest blind spots in grid monitoring today, and how is Ting Insights helping to close those gaps?

Today’s grid monitoring largely stops at the substation or feeder level, leaving the “last mile” invisible. This is the network of poles, transformers, and wires serving individual streets, homes and businesses. Yet this is precisely where power quality and reliability are most critical, and where most outages and safety risks begin.

Utilities do track and report reliability, but current reporting does not address power quality, which is often the hidden driver of appliance failures, fire risks, and broader grid stress. Ting fills this gap by providing a uniform, independent source of truth that covers both reliability and power quality across every utility territory.

By synchronizing millions of vantage points, Ting creates a bottom-up, standardized view of grid health. The result is a granular, real-time map that bridges the gap between utilities, insurers, first responders, and homeowners. This is the missing puzzle piece for a truly modernized grid.

Looking ahead 5-10 years, how do you see Ting Insights shaping the way we monitor, manage, and protect the grid?

Over the next decade, the Ting sensor network will expand to tens of millions of homes, and Ting Insights will become a core pillar of grid modernization. With electrification surging across EVs, heat pumps, and distributed solar and wind, grids will face stress and complexity unlike anything before. Ting provides the real-time situational awareness needed to manage that future: predicting failures, preventing fires, validating resilience investments, and enabling smarter insurance and emergency response systems.

In 5 to 10 years, we envision Ting Insights as a trusted source of truth for grid operators, insurers, policymakers, and consumers. It will be a safety net and intelligence layer that makes the grid safer, cleaner, and more resilient for all.

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