From the looks of it the founder and her roommate (a political science major who's since been written out of the company's history) developed a basic idea with no experience or demonstrable ability to turn it into a product, and received tens of millions to give it a shot.

It's not a new idea--ultrasound is already used to power pacemakers, and people have been playing with the concept for years. However, basic calculations shows that this is not likely to be practical as a consumer device. The founder has no physics or electrical engineering background, so there's no reason to think that she has some unique ability to overcome these hurdles. She's also hasn't demonstrated that she's developed any novel techniques to overcome the engineering challenges.

So why all the VC money? Why give VC money to a 20 something with no experience and no background with the hope that she'll hire enough engineers to figure it out? It just doesn't make sense to me.

I said the same thing about Theranos. They basically gave an inexperienced person who had no real domain knowledge millions of dollars to run a research lab. It looks very similar. Are VCs just desperate for a media friendly founder success story?

edit: Turns out there was already a patent covering something very similar filed in 2003 https://www.google.com/patents/US6798716?dq=ultrasound+power...