Eden Full

She was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Her roster profile at Princeton University Athletics names her parents as Bruce and Shelly Full and lists a sister, Vivian.⁠[1][2]

HuffPost Canada’s 2015 profile states that her parents were Chinese refugees from Vietnam who arrived in Canada with nothing, learned English and became computer programmers and graphic designers. The Conference Board’s biography describes her as the daughter of refugees and as Chinese-Canadian.⁠[3][4]

Princeton Alumni Weekly’s 2013 cover story describes her as a second-generation Chinese immigrant who speaks fluent Cantonese, and says that neither of her parents went to college.⁠[5]

A 2009 MaRS Discovery District article says that she decided at the age of three to become a scientist.⁠[6][7]

Business Vision writes that at about ten she built a small solar-powered car from instructions in a library book and tested it under different conditions, and that in 2002 she won an award at the Calgary Youth Science Fair, which the article treats as the start of her path as a scientist and inventor.⁠[8]

Sources differ on her age when she built the car: Ashoka’s article says she entered a science competition and built her first solar car at nine, and HuffPost Canada says that by nine she had built a solar-powered toy car that could travel from one end of her house to the other; Princeton Alumni Weekly and Entrepreneur give the age as ten, and Entrepreneur adds that it was a desktop solar car assembled from a kit.⁠[9][3][5][10]

Youth Are Awesome, the blog of the Calgary youth organization Youth Central, writes that Youth Central first knew her in 2005, when she contributed 45 hours to imagineCALGARY, a project that helps Calgarians plan a sustainable future.⁠[11]

A 2018 MIT Climate Portal article says that SunSaluter began in 2006 as her school science-fair project, and quotes her as saying that growing up in Calgary, a center of the oil and gas industry, made her curious about renewable energy. Business Vision writes that engineers in Calgary often went into oil and gas, but that she was drawn to solar power and recognized that tracking the sun is the key to a solar panel’s efficiency.⁠[12][8]

Princeton Alumni Weekly writes that she began designing the device, which tilts solar panels to follow the sun, while in high school, and that her parents sometimes let her call in sick to school so that she could work on it.⁠[5]

Entrepreneur writes that in her junior year of high school she took the idea to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, where a student from Indonesia suggested deploying the device in her country, since areas outside Jakarta lacked electricity. HuffPost Canada writes that this Indonesian friend from the science fair showed her how useful the device could be for remote communities, which led her later to launch a non-profit focused on the developing world.⁠[10][3]

In 2008 she attended the Shad program at its Trent University campus in Peterborough, Ontario. Shad Canada’s 2025 alumni story says that the program’s Design Challenge taught her to balance ideas within a group, to compromise and to persist through engineering setbacks; of the group work she said: “When you’re 16, you’re not always great at being flexible in group settings.”⁠[13]

A Design Engineering article of May 11, 2009 says that, at 17 and a student at John G. Diefenbaker High School in Calgary, she had received national recognition and more than $95,000 in scholarships (amounts as printed by the Canadian publication) for her solar-panel tracking system: she was one of nine Canadian students to receive the $25,000 Millennium Excellence Award, and she received a $70,000 TD Canada Trust Scholarship for Community Leadership, which covers full tuition for four years, $7,500 a year for living expenses and employment with TD Canada Trust.⁠[14]

The article says that her invention, then called Dynamic Photovoltaics, was a passive solar tracker that turned photovoltaic panels toward the sun with bi-metallic strips, avoiding the costly, complex and fragile motors and control systems of conventional trackers, and that its materials were inexpensive, environmentally safe and commonly available in developing countries, and easy to repair.⁠[14]

She won the inaugural Weston Youth Innovation Award, worth $2,000 as printed in the article of the Toronto-based MaRS Discovery District; a MaRS Discovery District article of May 19, 2009 says the award was to be presented on May 29 at the Ontario Science Centre. In her application she wrote that conventional active tracking systems need electricity to drive motors, while passive systems contain toxic compounds such as chlorofluorocarbons; she said the award would help her pursue a patent and the implementation of her system in developing countries.⁠[6][14]

The MaRS article adds that she was then in Grade 12, had competed in the Canada-Wide Science Fair, had won a scholarship to the United States Space Camp and was Alberta coordinator of Youth Science Foundation Canada’s SMARTS Network; Hooley McLaughlin of the Ontario Science Centre said she had used the invention as the basis of an environmental awareness campaign aimed at students. Design Engineering wrote that she would travel to the national science fair in Winnipeg in May.⁠[6][14]

A 2015 Business InsiderBusiness InsiderBusiness Insider is a digital business-news organization.Open the full entry article says that she graduated from John G. Diefenbaker High School.⁠[15]

She entered Princeton University in September 2009, after a summer spent studying climate change in the Canadian Arctic. HuffPost Canada writes that on an Arctic trip during her high-school years she saw climate change harming polar bears, which strengthened her commitment to finding energy solutions.⁠[5][3]

In a 2012 article in The Daily Princetonian she said that she chose Princeton for its small engineering school and its focus on undergraduates, not for its entrepreneurial community, and that she had expected those resources to help her develop the SunSaluter. Entrepreneur writes that her Princeton application essay was about the SunSaluter.⁠[16][10]

She took Professor Winston Wole Soboyejo’s course on science, technology and African development, and he advised her in designing sustainable metal buildings in the Engineering Projects in Community Service program.⁠[5]

She coxed Princeton’s lightweight women’s crew, winning a bronze medal with the novice eight at the Eastern Sprints as a freshman and another bronze with the second varsity eight as a sophomore. She also initiated and curated TEDxPrincetonU.⁠[2][1]

In the summer of 2010, with support from Princeton’s Grand Challenges program, she went to Kenya to study solar power and water filtration and spent three weeks testing SunSaluter prototypes. Entrepreneur writes that a Princeton professor who did research in Kenya offered her money to start the SunSaluter when she planned a summer trip there to help him, and that on this first trip to a developing country the device worked, but not well. In the interview published by Front Lines she said that she had done a summer internship in Kenya and Uganda, where she learned how remote communities used solar power for lanterns and phones.⁠[17][5][10][18]

Princeton Alumni Weekly wrote in 2011 that the Sun Saluter of that time moved the panel by thermal expansion instead of an electric motor. Ivey Business School’s article says that the prototype proved too costly and complicated for developing countries; Silicon Republic writes that when she took the prototype to East Africa for testing, villagers said that the parts were not readily available locally and that the device could be dangerous to children playing nearby, and that she spent the rest of the trip learning about local conditions and asking which materials could be found there.⁠[17][1][19]

She has recounted meeting in Kenya a mother of three who used solar energy to power her lanterns; while Full was in a nearby city buying supplies to improve the panels, the woman went out in the dark to find firewood and was trampled to death by a water buffalo. She said the experience showed her that she was passionate about people and about making a difference in their lives, and that it moved her to take time off to work on the project.⁠[5][1]

Youth Are Awesome writes that in August 2010 she installed two SunSaluters in villages in Kenya, improving the lives of 1,000 Kenyans; Ashoka’s article says that her company provided solar power to two villages in Kenya, benefiting more than 1,000 residents.⁠[11][9]

On May 25, 2011 Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry announced the first class of the Thiel Fellowship; Eden Full was listed in the “ENERGY” group with Tom Currier, Jim Danielson and Sujay TyleSujay TyleSujay Tyle is an American entrepreneur and angel investor and one of the first Thiel Fellows; he co-founded and led Frontier Car Group, a used-car marketplace for emerging markets, and later co-founded Merama, a Latin American e-commerce brand company, of which he is chief executive officer.Open the full entry. TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry wrote that the Thiel Foundation would provide each fellow with $100,000 over the two-year program.⁠[20]

Princeton Alumni Weekly wrote in July 2011 that the mechanical and aerospace engineering major in the class of 2013 had received $100,000 to help bring the Sun Saluter, a low-cost solar-panel rotator, to market; accepting it meant leaving Princeton for two years, a decision she called difficult but an opportunity she could not pass up, since coursework had left her little time for the project during the school year. She planned to move to San Francisco in August to finalize a prototype, attract financiers and arrange manufacturing.⁠[17]

She learned of the award in the spring of her sophomore year: when the call came she was coxing the women’s lightweight crew on Lake Carnegie, and she returned the call after practice. She telephoned her parents in Calgary, who were supportive but apprehensive, and promised them that she would return to Princeton to finish her degree when the two years ended. She also aimed to return to the women’s lightweight rowing program, in which she had coxed for two seasons and would have one year of eligibility left after the two-year hiatus.⁠[5][17]

Danielle Strachman, program director for the Thiel Fellowship, said that Eden Full stood out because she had already begun building a product and because her project met both a technical challenge and a pressing social need.⁠[5]

Entrepreneur writes that in her sophomore year she grew frustrated that coursework competed with the SunSaluter for her time, and that she heard of the fellowship from a friend; in NPR’s story she said she applied because she could not see how to build a business while being a full-time student. CleanTechnica writes that she was 19 in 2011.⁠[10][21][22]

She developed the SunSaluter through Roseicollis Technologies Inc., the company she founded; its name comes from the Latin name of her favorite species of lovebird. Ashoka’s article says she founded the company at 19.⁠[5][9]

In 2011 the SunSaluter placed second in the Postcode Lottery Green Challenge in the Netherlands, with a prize of €200,000 to refine the product, establish a business model and build a team. Sources convert the sum differently: Princeton Alumni Weekly gives about $275,000, Ashoka about US$266,000, Youth Are Awesome, on October 6, 2011, about C$280,000, and TechCrunch, in December 2011, $300K.⁠[11][5][9][23]

She was the grand-prize winner of the 2011 Staples/Ashoka Youth Social Entrepreneur Competition: four winners were invited to pitch at Techonomy 2011 in Tucson, ArizonaArizonaArizona is a state in the southwestern United States; its capital and largest city is Phoenix. Arizona was admitted to the Union on February 14, 1912, as the 48th state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 7,151,502.Open the full entry, before an audience that included more than 20 Ashoka Fellows, and the audience vote gave her the grand prize, a learning tour around the world. Princeton Alumni Weekly writes that the tour took her to Indonesia, Kenya and Egypt to meet other entrepreneurs, that she used it to deploy and test the SunSaluter there, and that she later extended testing to Uganda and Tanzania.⁠[9][5]

Ashoka’s article says that she planned to install the SunSaluter in Tanzania, Uganda, western China and other developing regions.⁠[9]

The SunSaluter also won the Mashable/UN Foundation Startups for Social Good Challenge, and she received a smaller grant from Scotiabank; Princeton Alumni Weekly notes that, unlike the Thiel Fellowship money, these funds were earmarked for business development.⁠[1][5]

Entrepreneur writes that in 2011 ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry named her one of 30 promising energy innovators under 30; Worth’s profile page says she was named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in the Energy category for 2012. HuffPost Canada, the Trico Charitable Foundation and NAAEE all state that she was on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 energy list three years in a row.⁠[10][24][3][7][25]

NPR’s story says that in the fall of 2011 she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area with the other fellows, found the group’s culture of extreme sleep deprivation unhelpful, and decided to put balance and happiness first.⁠[21]

Princeton Alumni Weekly writes that the Thiel Foundation placed no restrictions on how the money was used, though she attended regular update meetings; she backpacked across Europe with a friend and rowed with the Canadian national team for several months, living in London, Ontario, and racing with the team in London and Amsterdam, while balancing training with work on her business.⁠[5]

She was selected as coxswain of Rowing Canada’s 2012 senior women’s development team; the openweight eight won gold at the Holland Beker regatta in Amsterdam and the Remenham Challenge Cup at the Henley Royal Regatta, where it beat the German Olympic boat. Business Vision writes that her proudest achievement is having been chosen as a coxswain for Rowing Canada Aviron’s pre-Olympic development team, with which her crew won two gold medals.⁠[1][2][8]

In April 2012 The Daily Princetonian wrote that she was due to return in the fall of 2013; she said that her time away had helped her grow as an entrepreneur and as a person and had taught her not to take her education for granted, that because neither of her parents had attended college she regarded her degree as a gift to them, and that her plan amounted to two years at Princeton, two years away and two more years at Princeton.⁠[16]

On September 11, 2012 she spoke to HBA students at Ivey Business School in the J.J. Wettlaufer Distinguished Visitor Lecture Series, with Tima Bansal and Claus Rerup moderating the question period; she said: “You have to be passionate and you just need to be frustrated that things aren’t working right.”⁠[1]

Princeton Alumni Weekly’s March 2013 story says that since returning to the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry in November she had lived and worked in an old firehouse in Oakland’s Chinatown; the building belongs to Danielle Fong of Princeton’s class of 2007, who offers it rent-free as a workspace and dormitory, and she lived upstairs with four other young entrepreneurs, sharing weekly dinners and a chore chart. Danielle Fong had come to know of her through the Thiel Fellowship. NPR calls the converted firehouse the “Firehome,” home to several startups, with her workspace on the ground floor.⁠[5][21]

She was then rowing about six days a week with three Bay Area clubs.⁠[5]

NPR’s December 2012 story says that she had refined the design so that a dripping water-filtration system supplied the weight that moves the panel, giving villagers both more solar power and clean water; she designed it so that villagers without technical knowledge could maintain it, regarding complicated technology as a common cause of failures in the field. She believed the device could bring affordable electricity to the 1.5 billion people without it. The company then had a small staff, and she was confident it could sustain itself while she finished her degree.⁠[21]

Princeton Alumni Weekly wrote in March 2013 that the SunSaluter was made of bamboo and metal, cost about $20 to build, could raise energy output by as much as 40 percent and could charge a lantern, two cellphones or a 12-volt battery; a newer model used two small metal tanks and a filter to produce about four liters of clean water a day in addition to electricity. Donated SunSaluters supplied electricity to more than 5,000 people in five villages in Africa; manufacturing took place only in the Bay Area, though she had explored a manufacturing subsidiary in East Africa; the company had hired its first two employees and the product was not yet for sale, and she described the company’s progress as “Baby steps.”⁠[5]

An Entrepreneur article of April 18, 2013 gives the price of the solar-panel rotator as $25 and says that the previous two years of development had been funded by Ashoka, the Postcode Lottery Green Challenge and the Thiel Fellowship: the Ashoka funding let her travel to developing regions to understand local communities, and the Postcode Lottery prize went to product development and team building. The company earned only enough revenue to cover its costs, had one full-time employee and three part-time designers and project developers, and was pursuing partnerships in South Africa, Indonesia, Kenya and the Philippines.⁠[10]

The article says that, because partners wanted to build SunSaluters themselves, the company planned to restructure as a nonprofit providing open-source technology and support; she said her goal was to put as many SunSaluters as possible into as many hands as possible, and that she needed to let others run with the project and improve it. In April 2013 she spoke on a panel on the future of electricity at the Clinton Global Initiative University. She was then 21 and living in Berkeley, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry, and planned to return to Princeton in the fall and manage her team by Skype once or twice a day between classes; she said she missed the college experience, including rowing on the team; she said she had gaps in her skills, such as not knowing CAD software, that she felt were easier to fill in a classroom.⁠[10]

She was a speaker at TEDxBerkeley in 2013; the conference site’s biography says she was then living in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she trained with the California Rowing Club.⁠[26]

Princeton Alumni Weekly wrote in March 2013 that she would return in September as a junior, now in the class of 2015 instead of 2013, as a prospective mechanical and aerospace engineering major whose senior thesis was to examine the biomechanics of rowing, and that she planned to keep running her business while in school. She said that she had been immature in college before, spending much of her time rowing and socializing, and that the two-year break had shown her what she wanted to pursue.⁠[5]

Princeton Athletics’ 2013–14 roster lists her as a junior on the women’s lightweight crew majoring in mechanical engineering: in 2014 she coxed the varsity eight to a bronze medal at the Eastern Sprints, returned it to the IRA grand final, where it finished fifth, and helped retain the Class of 2006 Cup against Georgetown. The profile says that she joined the coaching staff for the 2014–15 season, assisting head coach Paul Rassam and assistant coach Hank Zimmerman.⁠[2]

At Princeton she studied mechanical engineering, computer science, and robotics and intelligent systems; Business Vision quotes her: “Part of the reason I went back to school was to get more technical fluency.”⁠[25][8]

A 2015 Business Insider article says that, at 23, she lived in New York City and led SunSaluter’s five-person team; she had returned to Princeton after the fellowship and later left again to run SunSaluter full time, having completed a major in mechanical engineering and minors in computer science and robotics systems, which she chose on the strength of her time in San Francisco, but she had not graduated because a few humanities requirements remained. She had first seen the fellowship as a gap in the middle of college after which she would return and graduate, and now thought that this did not have to be the path.⁠[15]

The article says that the SunSaluter was then in use in 15 countries and captured about 30 percent more electricity, that core manufacturing was in India and that the organization was looking to expand manufacturing to Malawi; her aim was to create entrepreneurial opportunities in developing countries by offering guidance, mentorship and some funding so that the technology could spread. Business Insider had earlier, in November, included her in its list of “16 Incredibly Impressive Students At Princeton.”⁠[15]

She said that through the fellowship she had met a clean-tech startup founder, a solar-industry consultant and a startup lawyer; of her time in San Francisco she said that outside an academic environment “you can learn more quickly and more effectively.” The Trico Charitable Foundation’s article says that the fellowship taught her that people are willing to help, and that one has to be open and honest to get that help.⁠[15][7]

HuffPost Canada’s profile of May 2015 says that the SunSaluter was producing power in 16 countries, using three water bottles and gravity to make solar panels track the sun: as water drips out through a filter the bottles grow lighter and the panel gradually turns through the day. She drew no pay from the non-profit she had launched. She said that helping people charge phones, lanterns and radios also helped them connect with others.⁠[3]

Princeton Alumni Weekly’s issue of July 8, 2015 notes that Design News called the latest version of the SunSaluter “a clever idea to address these two problems simultaneously.”⁠[27]

CleanTechnica wrote in July 2015 that she had moved toward nonprofit work and was founder and CEO of the SunSaluter nonprofit; the device was sold as a do-it-yourself kit, had by 2015 been deployed in 16 countries and provided electricity and clean water to 8,000 people, and the organization was seeking entrepreneurs and partners for marketing and manufacturing and accepted donations.⁠[22]

A Trico Charitable Foundation article of August 31, 2015 says that, at 23, she was leading public workshops at that year’s Beakerhead for a Better World events in Calgary and working with more than 650 students in schoolyard workshops on renewable energy, solar power, water filtration and human ingenuity, and that on September 17 she would be one of five social entrepreneurs on a panel. She named Bill Drayton, founder and CEO of Ashoka, as a role model, held that every entrepreneur should have a social impact, and said: “The way I approach design is to develop the simplest solution possible.” She said she wanted to help alleviate energy poverty and planned to keep working on solutions over the next ten years.⁠[7]

Her speaker biography for the STARWEST conference says that she studied mechanical engineering and computer science at Princeton and left before graduating to found SunSaluter.⁠[28]

A Trico Charitable Foundation article of August 24, 2016, and later sources, call her Eden Full Goh. The article says that SunSaluter had made 200 deployments in 19 countries over the past year and was concentrating on releasing open-source materials and strengthening partnerships; she said that a strong partnership in India had led the organization to move its whole office from Bangalore to Odisha, closer to the communities and to the partner.⁠[29]

The article says that a board of directors now guided SunSaluter’s decisions, with members skilled in engineering, social media, open source, solar, fundraising, communications, measurement and user-interface design; she said that building the board had taken nine months and that she had valued trustworthiness and work ethic over financial contributions or connections. A patent that had been pending for years was finally granted; she said she had sought it mainly to keep others from blocking her, and advised testing a product before pursuing a patent. Engineering for Change’s product page records the patent as US Patent 9,276,520 B2.⁠[29][30]

In the article she said that check-ins with users showed a real improvement in their quality of life, mentioning girls who could study at night in a library powered by a SunSaluter, and that the best customers tended to be those who already had solar experience or related businesses. The organization planned an online platform with build instructions within a couple of months, customers could alternatively buy a finished unit, an automatic SunSaluter was in development, and income was to come from larger companies, licensing, small retail sales, donations and strategic partnerships. She also observed that media coverage had shifted from the founder’s story to the organization’s mission and impact, pointing to a June 2016 CNBCCNBCCNBC is an American business and financial news cable channel launched by NBC in 1989; it merged with its rival FNN in 1991 and since January 2026 has been part of Versant Media Group, spun off from Comcast.Open the full entry feature on SunSaluter that did not mention her.⁠[29]

On June 30, 2016 she entered the SunSaluter, as a team entry registered in New York, in Tech Briefs’ Create the Future Design Contest; it received a 2016 honorable mention in the Sustainable Technologies category and a place among the year’s top 100 entries. The entry lists as team members the board members Phil Hannam, Rachel Han, Victor Liu, Victoria Alleyne, Anuradha Dhavala and Serena Xu; Andie Goh, for fundraising, financial planning and forecasting; Sambit Sasmal, director; Santosh Ku. Jha, production engineer; and Promise Daniel Chidothe, regional coordinator.⁠[31]

The entry states that the pilot phase had deployed more than 155 units in 19 countries over two years, positively affecting 10,000 people; that local manufacturing in Bangalore had completed 50 units for the pilot phase and that there were distribution operations in Malawi; that a larger automatic model supported solar arrays of up to 1.2 kW, using a water pump for hands-free operation; and that the target cost was $10 a unit.⁠[31]

She was named to NAAEE’s 30 Under 30 for 2016. NAAEE’s biography describes her as a software and mechanical engineer living in New York City; SunSaluter as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that takes a market-based approach, helping local entrepreneurs start for-profit businesses around the technology; and the device as serving off-grid communities in eighteen countries and as 30 times cheaper than conventional motorized rotators. Among her honors it also lists the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s IP Champion.⁠[25]

An interview published by Front Lines says that after running the nonprofit for a time she handed day-to-day operations to local partners, open-sourced its content and moved to New York; she said that she gets very homesick and wanted to put down roots somewhere. Shad Canada writes that in New York she worked in product development and management at technology companies.⁠[18][13]

TechCrunch writes that she had worked as a product engineer at PalantirPalantirPalantir is a U.S. enterprise software company founded in 2003 that provides data and artificial intelligence platforms including Gotham, Foundry, Palantir Apollo, and AIP, serving government and commercial organizations. The company went public through a direct listing in 2020 and now trades on Nasdaq under the ticker PLTR.Open the full entry and at Butterfly Network, a medical-device company; biographies such as The Conference Board’s say that at the two companies she built products in the energy, healthcare and government sectors, and Cota Capital describes her as a product manager at the time.⁠[32][4][33]

Mobot was founded in early 2018. TechCrunch writes that she had noticed how inefficient mobile-app testing was because it relied on manual work: her former employers, Palantir and Butterfly Network among them, hired employees or contractors to test by hand, which she considered inefficient, costly and error-prone. Front Lines writes that as a product manager she had no ready-made tool and tested by hand on the many physical devices on her desk.⁠[32][34]

Cota Capital’s founder profile says that the idea for Mobot came to her in the shower one night while she was dreading another late-night testing session; she held that mobile apps needed to be tested on real devices, since software-only tools could not reproduce the way people actually use phones, especially for push notifications, hardware integrations and multi-device interactions, and so proposed automating manual testing with physical, mechanical robots. The first prototype was built from a modified robot originally designed to sign greeting cards.⁠[33]

Y Combinator’s company page lists Mobot as a company of its Winter 2019 (W19) batch, founded in 2018 and based in New York City. VentureFizz’s podcast page says that she is a solo founder and that Mobot is backed by Primary Venture Partners, Newark Venture Partners, Bling Capital, RRE Ventures and Y Combinator.⁠[35][36]

Silicon Republic wrote on July 17, 2018 that she announced on stage at Inspirefest 2018 that the SunSaluter, originally patented, was now open source so that anyone could build it; she said the project had affected 17,000 people so far and that she wanted to extend its reach. The article calls her a Chinese-Canadian inventor.⁠[19]

An MIT Climate Portal article of July 27, 2018 calls her a Grand Prize winner of MIT’s Climate CoLab and names Victoria Alleyne as director of SunSaluter. In it she says: “over the last few years, our team has impacted over 17,000 people in 19 countries with our work”; the team had developed more than 60 prototypes with innovators, communities with deployments and implementing organizations on the ground, offered step-by-step installation instructions on the SunSaluter website, and had deployments in places including India and Kenya. She said the team had met many people through Climate CoLab’s online platform and in-person events in Boston, and that the prize money had gone to SunSaluter’s operating expenses.⁠[12]

A Trico Charitable Foundation article of August 21, 2018 says that SunSaluter had by then open-sourced its design in order to reach millions more people, and that the organization was run by volunteers, which she said made it hard to scale. It adds that an early beta of the online content had been released to a pilot group of users in 2016, that in 2017 the organization had given priority to local implementation with partners in Odisha, India, where it also held in-person workshops, and that it began developing its open-source content in earnest earlier in 2018; non-experts could build the device from local materials in a couple of hours, and a free build guide was posted at sunsaluter.org/build.⁠[37]

Engineering for Change’s product page describes her as SunSaluter’s founder and board chair.⁠[30]

On August 15, 2022 TechCrunch wrote that Mobot had closed a $12.5 million Series A round led by Cota Capital, with participation from Heavybit, Uncorrelated Ventures, Bling Capital and Primary Venture Partners, bringing the total raised to $17.8 million; the proceeds were to expand the sales, marketing and engineering teams. The company then had 42 employees and planned to reach 50 by the end of the year.⁠[32]

The article explains that customers set up a test case by recording a video of the app and the target devices, that a customer success manager helps build the test flow and connect Mobot’s analytics to tools such as Jira, and that the robots run tests on more than 200 mobile devices, using computer vision to tap, swipe, rotate devices, connect Bluetooth peripherals and receive push notifications. She described Mobot as the first “infrastructure-as-a-service” platform to use physical robots to automate app testing on devices, positioned not as a replacement for emulators or automated software testing but for manual testing, with crowdsourced and outsourced manual-testing firms such as Applause, Infosys and Qualitest as its biggest competitors; the article also mentions the Finnish firm OptoFidelity.⁠[32]

Early customers included Citizen, Mapbox, Branch, Radar, Persona and about 45 others; Mobot had run thousands of test cycles, collected millions of screenshots and was building a testing framework for augmented-reality headsets, smartwatches and other devices. She called Mobot a “counter-cyclical” business, saying that demand for mobile testing had not fallen during the technology industry’s hiring freezes and layoffs, and envisioned large robot warehouses able to perform many of the physical actions a person can perform on a device.⁠[32]

An undated interview published by Front Lines says that, about five years into her running Mobot, it was a 45-person company based in New York with more than 60 customers, Citizen and BeReal among them; its robots were desktop-sized machines built in-house that could be stacked on shelves, all of them then in New York, and customers typically began with a pilot engagement. The company’s long-term vision was to let anyone in the world log in to its platform at mobot.io, connect to a robot live, control it and automate tests.⁠[18][34]

On September 23, 2025 Shad Canada published an alumni story that describes her as founder and CEO of Mobot: the company uses artificial intelligence, computer vision and mechanical robots to test and monitor mobile and physical product experiences, operates its own robots and offers them as “infrastructure-as-a-service,” and counts among its clients Best Buy Health, whose software runs in hundreds of hospitals worldwide. The story carries a photograph of her speaking about Mobot at the New York Stock ExchangeNew York Stock ExchangeThe New York Stock Exchange is a securities exchange on Wall Street in New York City. It traces its origins to the Buttonwood Agreement signed by 24 stockbrokers in 1792, has used its present name since 1863 and has been owned by Intercontinental Exchange since 2013.Open the full entry and says that SunSaluter has reached communities in more than 17 countries. In the story she said that the SunSaluter experience taught her to design and scale technology in the field, hire a team and raise funds: “Those were all core skills for an engineer-entrepreneur.” She also said: “You never max out on things to learn or challenges to solve.”⁠[13]

As of November 2026, Y Combinator’s company page still lists Mobot as an active company with a team size of 40, and lists Eden Full Goh as its founder.⁠[35]

The SunSaluter is a passive, single-axis tracker: the solar panel sits on a rotating frame with a weight hung from one end; the weight is an outflow water clock, and as the water drips out the weight lightens and the panel turns, at a speed that can be changed by adjusting the drip rate. It can be fitted to existing solar panels without special tools. Business Vision describes a weight on one side and a water-filled jerry can on the other.⁠[22][8]

Sources state the gain differently: Youth Are Awesome (2011), NPR (2012), Princeton Alumni Weekly (2013), HuffPost Canada and the Trico Charitable Foundation (2015) and the contest entry she submitted in 2016 give 40 percent or up to 40 percent; Business Insider, CleanTechnica, NAAEE, Engineering for Change and Shad Canada about 30 percent; Business Vision almost a third; and the 2018 articles of the MIT Climate Portal and the Trico Charitable Foundation 30 to 40 percent. Engineering for Change’s product page describes a wooden rotator with a suggested retail price of $50 that can be built in one to two hours and lasts five to ten years with proper maintenance; it states that up to 17,335 SunSaluter trackers have been built and used in 19 countries, mainly in India, Sub-Saharan Africa and North America, and records a pilot with local families in Mpala, Kenya, and the deployment of the newer version with the filtration system with a maternity clinic in Kirindi, Uganda.⁠[11][21][5][3][7][31][15][22][25][13][8][12][37][30]

The contest entry she submitted in 2016 also lists the Westly Prize, the OpenIDEO Renewable Energy Challenge and The Tech Awards, as well as finalist places in Project Inspire, run by the Singapore Committee of UN Women, the Rolex Awards for Enterprise and the William James Foundation’s 2014 sustainable business plan competition.⁠[31]

In NPR’s 2012 story her advice to students in a similar position was to take time off, work out what they want to do and return to college later, when they are more mature.⁠[21]

Entrepreneur’s 2013 article records her advice to entrepreneurs considering a non-traditional path: it can be frightening, but it is worthwhile in order to avoid living by default.⁠[10]

In a 2015 interview with Business Insider she said that the fellowship suits people who are restless to start something, have a plan to make an impact and feel that the plan cannot wait, and who often see ordinary commitments such as finishing college or taking a job as distractions; running one’s own project carries heavy responsibility, since no one knows if you skip work and no one checks on you or supports you step by step, and it can be emotionally and professionally turbulent, so that she would not recommend it to the “faint of heart.” She also held that motivated people could achieve similar results without the fellowship, and that a degree is not the only route to success.⁠[38][15]

Front Lines writes that running the nonprofit taught her about product development and market needs, but that she decided she did not want to be that kind of founder; speaking of Princeton, she said that what she had taken was a two-year leave of absence, not a permanent exit.⁠[34][18]

In her 2015 interview with HuffPost Canada she said: “I’m always very grateful to my wife, my friends and family, my teammates.” The Trico Charitable Foundation’s article of the same year likewise says that she credits her wife, friends, family and teammates with helping her through moments of self-doubt. Speaking in the HuffPost Canada interview of an issue she hoped to see resolved, she said: “Personally, marriage equality is a very important issue for me.” She said: “I’m very grateful that a couple years ago DOMA was struck down and I’d like to see that equality for all 50 states,” and added that the United States is the place where she sees herself living.⁠[3][7]

In that interview she said: “I’m on a rowing team and I’m also a coach now.” She described rowing as an outlet for stress, saying: “It’s also the only socially acceptable place for you to yell at people.” She said that she needs at least eight or nine hours of sleep a night and makes sleep a priority, whereas as a teenager she had worked on science-fair projects in a constant state of sleep deprivation, and that family matters most to her, so that work can wait when loved ones need her. She also recalled meeting Arianna HuffingtonArianna HuffingtonArianna Huffington is an author, media entrepreneur, and the founder and chief executive officer of Thrive Global. Born in Greece, she studied economics at the University of Cambridge, worked early on in writing and political commentary, and co-founded The Huffington Post in 2005. In 2016, she left the outlet and founded Thrive Global, whose business has gradually extended into employee well-being, behavior change, and AI health coaching.Open the full entry at an awards ceremony a couple of years earlier and hearing her say that some of the best things in her life had come from heartbreak.⁠[3]

Princeton Alumni Weekly wrote in 2013 that she is 4 feet 11 inches tall and describes herself as a socially minded entrepreneur and a coxswain. Ivey Business School’s biography says she calls herself “proudly Canadian.”⁠[5][1]

Business Vision writes that her personal goals include learning Chinese, owning fewer possessions and improving her fitness. In the Front Lines interview she named James Clear’s Atomic Habits as her favorite book. She said she applies its idea of improving by 1 percent a day at Mobot, which keeps a backlog of small improvements, and she also mentioned hobbies around music that she makes a point of prioritizing.⁠[8][18]

X: Public account: https://x.com/edenfull (opens in a new window).⁠[35][39]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edenfull/ (opens in a new window).⁠[35]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[40]