Disclosure: I just bought one. I’ve wanted one since I first wrote about the company back in 2010. My dream is to spend a full day blogging in the park, using the battery power and the solar panel. But I digress.

Fenix is using Kickstarter to test the waters for a U.S. market. Up to this point the startup has been selling its batteries through African telecom MTN in Uganda. Last month CEO Mike Lin told me that Fenix had shipped 2,000 of its batteries to MTN in Uganda. On Wednesday in an interview Lin told me that MTN Rwanda had also just signed up with Fenix as well to ship its batteries, and the company has pilots in Kenya and Tanzania.

In developing countries where there’s sporadic grid power, entrepreneurs can use the batteries to sell applications like cell phone charging. There’s already entrepreneurs doing this, but mostly they use old car batteries for charging, which can be costly and unsafe.

There’s some really interesting applications emerging around the battery, says Lin. For example, in places where peer-to-peer mobile payments, via SMS, is popular, a job has emerged called a mobile money agent — like a human ATM — and these entrepreneurs have been using Fenix’s off-grid battery to increase the amount of time they can provide that payment exchange service. Other applications include powering things like a refrigerator for vaccines, or lighting at night.

Telecoms in developing countries are interested in promoting off-grid batteries as a way to increase cell phone usage and penetration. In the way that mobile phone networks have leap-frogged wired phone connections in the developing world, off-grid power could eventually one day overcome grid power in these nations. Maybe — we’ll see. For that to happen they need energy storage, like Fenix’s productized lead acid battery.

Fenix sees its battery — and the secret sauce of the software that manages the charging — as a platform for enabling these energy applications. In the U.S., Fenix wants to encourage the creation of a developer community that will use its open hardware API to develop new applications like micro wind and water energy generation. That’s partly who Fenix expects to buy these early ones in the U.S. off of Kickstarter. The other interested customers in the battery could be the recreational types — imagine this on the shelf in REI next to camping equipment and emergency kits.

Beyond the Kickstarter campaign, Fenix is in the process of raising a $10 million Series B round to help it scale up and start cranking out its orders in Africa and potentially the U.S. Fenix will probably only start a big sales push in the U.S. if the Kickstarter campaign shows there’s a big market for it. However, just two days after the campaign was launched, Fenix has already hit close to $15,000 of its $20,000 order goal (with 29 more days to go), so I think it’s safe to say that it’s got some interest here in the U.S.

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Fenix’s battery device is called the ReadySet (see photo), and it comes in a protective casing, with all the basic connectors for charging devices like cell phones, lights, fans and TVs. The ReadySet has a set of smart circuitry that enables the battery to last up to three years (2 years longer than many of the car batteries that are being used in the ecosystem) and it also comes with power generation options, like a bike generator (up to 100 watt hours) and a solar panel (15 watt hours), which can recharge the battery with clean power.

The ReadySet, which cost around $150 when it was initially launched, is targeting an off-grid market of  entrepreneurs that commonly use junky car batteries to charge villager’s cell phones. For the about 2.6 billion people in the world who don’t have regular access to grid power, an ad-hoc economy has emerged around these car batteries. The ReadySet is a more long lasting, better designed and safer version of the car battery.

Around $150 is still pretty high for a product for the developing world, but Fenix is selling and giving the ReadySet to entrepreneurs that tend to have a little more access to capital than an average consumer is these regions. About 2.5 percent of the populations of these villages is some kind of entrepreneur, Fenix CEO Mike Lin told me in an interview when the company launched.

Fenix has decided to partner with the major telcos in the developing world for distribution, along with other partners like NGOs and service providers, to effectively and economically sell and market its devices. The telcos could benefit from the proliferation of the energy storage devices and distributed cell phone charging, and could white-label the ReadySets with their brands. MTN brands the ReadySet for its users.

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