U.S. Patent No. 9,347,629 formally issued by the USPTO on May 24, 2016, protecting Anna Stork's inflatable solar light invention.
On May 24, 2016, the United States Patent and Trademark Office formally granted U.S. Patent No. 9,347,629, titled "Inflatable Solar-Powered Light," to Anna Stork and Andrea Sreshta. This is the authoritative issue date confirmed directly in USPTO proceedings documents, distinguishing it from an earlier date shown on LuminAID's own promotional patent page.
The grant represented the culmination of a six-year journey from provisional filing in 2010 to a fully examined and approved utility patent, securing exclusive rights to the core mechanism of LuminAID's inflatable solar lantern — a folding, waterproof, solar-rechargeable light source that had already gained significant humanitarian and commercial traction by this point.
Securing this patent gave Stork and Sreshta legal standing to protect their invention from imitators as LuminAID's products expanded into disaster relief distribution, outdoor retail markets, and international humanitarian partnerships. It also cemented their status as recognized inventors in the clean-technology and social-enterprise space, an achievement notable for two women who developed the invention while still graduate students.
This patent grant would later become the subject of contested USPTO proceedings, underscoring its commercial value and the competitive interest it attracted in the solar lighting market.