As a chemical engineering major at Tulane, Ashman found an environment where engineering students studied alongside liberal arts majors, business students and digital media creators. “The best thing about Tulane is that it isn’t siloed,” he says. “Everyone intermixes because that’s the fabric of the school, and New Orleans is a big part of that.”
That interdisciplinary energy helped him think about technology not just as a set of technical puzzles but as something deeply human. “Tulane taught me to think beyond one piece of the equation.”
One of Ashman’s teachers, Katie C. Russell, now a senior professor of practice in the School of Science and Engineering, said that Ashman was the kind of student professors love to teach. “He had an innate ability and drive to solve problems using innovative solutions both inside and outside of the classroom.”
She said in senior design he created a novel process to produce renewable energy from wastewater. “I will always remember his stories about tinkering with carbon dioxide dosing to increase plant growth in his home aquarium.”
After early exposure to large-scale energy systems at a Louisiana refinery and later working in California’s fast-evolving clean energy sector, Ashman saw a gap he couldn’t ignore: most current backup and solar products were still too expensive, too complex or too restrictive for the majority of U.S. households. “Two-thirds of homes can’t access today’s backup or solar products,” he says. “Energy resilience should be available to everyone.”
His solution was Pila Energy. The company’s breakthrough is a modular, plug-in home battery system. Each 1.6 kWh unit simply plugs into the wall, no electrician or permit required. Multiple units form a mesh network, creating what Ashman calls a “distributed nanogrid” that uses artificial intelligence to autonomously manage and optimize the plug-in home batteries.
“It’s a measured, smart, surgical approach to keeping things running the right way,” Ashman says.
During a recent visit to Tulane, Ashman carved out time to speak with engineering students — conversations he remembers appreciating when he was in their shoes.
“I think that’s what we all need to do as alumni, so to be a small part of that, to offer help where I can, feels great,” he says.
As Pila grows, Ashman is focused on balancing rigorous engineering with thoughtful design. “We want energy independence to feel intuitive and beautiful,” he says. “The hardest problems are worth solving twice — once for the human experience, and again for the system it connects to.”
