Bates Marshall

Bates Marshall is Ambient’s Chief Executive Officer, co-founder, and a member of the company’s Board of Directors. Among his diverse responsibilities, he considers his role as growth champion his most significant — focused on helping both Ambient and its customer partners transform ambitious never-before-imagined ideas into market-transforming products at scale.

His ability to successfully facilitate and foster this growth stems from decades of experience in both the semiconductor and solar industries, during which he learned valuable lessons that inform Ambient’s strategic vision and daily operations.

As a product marketing and sales executive in the semiconductor and electronics industries for nearly 15 years, Bates developed expertise spanning the entire electronics ecosystem, from the chip stage through the supply chain through market development. This background gives him valuable insight into how Ambient’s customer’s businesses operate, how they think, what their product development cycles look like, the complexities of the technologies involved in their products, their product roadmaps, and what makes their products better over time.

Building on that experience, Bates moved full time into the solar PV industry during the global solar boom starting in 2005. During that time, he worked closely with PV start-ups around the world to construct factories, and bring novel PV process technologies to market. He also helped lead the way in growing and diversifying both applications and global markets for established solar technologies.

In 2019, Bates worked with Mill Valley, California-based Cthulhu Ventures to spin a novel photovoltaic technology out from the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry that has the potential to change the world. Together with the project leader Dr. Kethinni Chittibabu, he co-founded Ambient later that year. The promise of an entirely new low light photovoltaic chemistry and the chance to bring new products to market to which solar has never been applied presented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be at the leading edge of technological innovation that is not only revolutionizing electronics, but also enabling meaningful gains in global environmental sustainability.