ePropelled Founder Nick Grewal Named 2026 Entrepreneur of the Year by NH Tech Alliance

# Who won and why Nick Grewal, founder, chairman and CEO of ePropelled, was named 2026 Entrepreneur of the Year by the New Hampshire Tech Alliance and received the award at the Alliance's Innovation Summit in Nashua on October 6. The recognition covers his entrepreneurial work across more than four decades and highlights the development of ePropelled into a global technology company serving aerospace, defense, maritime, industrial and autonomous-systems markets.

# What ePropelled does Founded in 2018, ePropelled designs and manufactures intelligent propulsion and power systems for uncrewed vehicles operating in air, on land and at sea. The company positions itself around three technical areas: advanced propulsion hardware, power management systems, and software-defined propulsion architectures that integrate hardware, control software and connectivity into a single operating ecosystem.

Current company footprint includes manufacturing headquarters in New Hampshire and engineering centers in Coventry, United Kingdom, and Chennai, India. ePropelled serves customers through sovereign supply chains and emphasizes improving performance, endurance, efficiency and operational effectiveness for uncrewed platforms.

# Why the award focuses on Grewal's record The award reflects a combination of Grewal's long career and ePropelled's growth. Before ePropelled, Grewal founded Nashoba Networks, a networking company acquired by Cisco in 1996. He has since invested in and advised more than 40 technology companies and supported entrepreneurs and emerging ventures, including many in New Hampshire.

Grewal said the award is "ultimately a reflection of the talented people who have helped build ePropelled" and linked the company's work to broader trends in autonomy, electrification and intelligent energy management.

# How company leaders describe the work Dean Marcarelli, ePropelled's chief commercial officer, highlighted Grewal's early recognition that autonomy, electrification and intelligent power management would be defining technologies for coming decades. Marcarelli described ePropelled's recent focus on software-defined propulsion architectures that combine hardware, intelligence and connectivity into unified operational ecosystems for next-generation autonomous platforms.

# What this means for customers and markets ePropelled's stated aim is to help customers unlock new levels of performance across uncrewed aerial, ground and maritime systems. The company markets its technology to aerospace, defense and industrial customers and emphasizes sovereign supply chains, which matters to buyers seeking supply security and traceability for critical systems.

# Background and milestones

• ePropelled founded in 2018 and expanded into a global organization with manufacturing in New Hampshire and engineering centers in the UK and India.

• Grewal has a multi-decade record of investing in and advising technology companies (more than 40 firms).

# Bottom line Alliance award recognizes a long entrepreneurial career and the transformation of a startup into a multi-site engineering and manufacturing company focused on propulsion, power management and integrated software for uncrewed systems. ePropelled presents itself as a supplier to aerospace, defense and industrial markets with an emphasis on performance, autonomy-enabling technologies and sovereign supply chains.