Jemma Green was writing a doctoral thesis about households that make their own power when she noticed who was left out. Rooftop solar was spreading across Perth, but not to people who lived in apartments.
She was born in Perth and raised in the eastern hills. After a degree in finance she started her career in banking at J.P. Morgan in London, and spent years on environmental and social issues inside a bank. Then she came home and went back to study, taking on a PhD in sustainable energy. The question she kept returning to was simple. If someone has surplus solar, why can't they sell it to the neighbour next door?
The pre-sale raised about A$17 million and sold out within 72 hours on the Ethereum network.
In 2015 she met David Martin at an industry gathering. Martin had around twenty years in utilities and knew how slowly the grid moves. Between the banker-turned-researcher and the utilities man came the idea for a blockchain ledger that could record each tiny electricity transaction and settle it in real time. They founded Power Ledger in Perth in 2016, with John Bulich as a third co-founder.
The money arrived in an unusual way. In 2017 the company ran an initial coin offering. The pre-sale raised about A$17 million and sold out within 72 hours on the Ethereum network. Martin had predicted the final raise would land between A$20 and A$30 million. It closed near A$34 million, one of the largest successful ICOs by an Australian startup.
Green did not pretend the instrument was safe. She acknowledged that ICOs were highly speculative investments, and said the company set itself strict self-imposed rules around the sale. That candour matters: tokens, not equity, funded the build.
Recognition followed. In 2018 Power Ledger won Richard Branson's Extreme Tech Challenge, and Green was named EY Australian Fintech Entrepreneur of the Year. Origin Energy trialled the peer-to-peer platform, and the company set about proving the technology in real energy markets.
The price of that fast start is a long tail of expectation. A token boom raises money quickly and then asks you to justify it for years, across crypto cycles and slow-moving regulators. Green's origin story is a quieter lesson: a researcher's irritation with a gap in the system, paired with a partner who knew how the system worked, can be enough to start something. The ICO was the megaphone. The thesis question was the engine.