Page 64 - Forbes - Asia (June 2018)

Technology

Black Magic Powder

The alchemists at Sila Nano have their eyes on a $31 billion—and growing—
lithium-ion battery market. They just might get a nice piece of it.
BY ALEX KNAPP

ila Nanotechnologies has all the trappings of a typical ultimately be won by solid-state batteries, which eliminate the
Bay Area startup: an open loor plan, conference rooms liquid electrolyte typical of today’s batteries. For now, though,
named for Atari games, healthy snacks in the kitchen. that competitive threat is remote.
STwo Portuguese water dogs, Ångström and Lumen, rule Sila has a less ambitious redesign of the lithium-ion battery
the boss’ oice. under way. Its powder would simply replace the graphite in ex-
Walk through the entrance and open the door, however, isting battery technology. “Sila has a signiicant lead just be-
and you won’t ind racks of servers or a foosball table. Instead, cause of the fact that they’re going to have a drop-in manu-
you’ll see an industrial laboratory, complete with white-suited facturing process,” says Sam Jafe, managing director of Cairn
workers in a clean room. Two-liter furnaces are hooked up to Energy Research Advisors.
gas lines, computers and chemistry instrumentation. Construc- Most lithium-ion batteries use an anode made largely from
tion workers are tending a large, mysterious cylinder. graphite, a form of carbon that can be either mined or synthe-
It’s all to perfect and then to commercialize a ine black sized. When the battery is being discharged, lithium ions de-
powder in a glass jar resting in the hand of Gene Berdichevsky, part the anode and move to the cathode, creating an electron
34, the company’s cofounder and chief executive. What, exact- low to power your phone or car motor. When the battery is
ly, is this powder? hat is a secret, although we can tell you that being charged, the ions reverse course.
there is some silicon in it and that, if this substance does what Sila’s powder beats graphite because silicon can hold signif-
it’s supposed to do, it will deliver a 40% boost to the energy icantly more lithium ions than graphite. Silicon is also cheap-
performance of lithium-ion batteries. er than graphite. But there’s a catch. When silicon holds lithi-
“I think what Intel did for the semiconductor and person- um ions, it swells fourfold, like a bellows. he shi in volume
al computing industry in the ’90s is what we would want to en- would drastically shorten the life span of the battery.
able in battery technologies,” Berdichevsky says grandly. To avoid this problem, Sila builds a microscopic cage—
He has believers. Sila has raised more than $100 million a nanocomposite that’s silicon-dominant—that holds silicon
from Samsung Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, In-Q- with enough room for the expansion and contraction within.
Tel and others. It is partnering with Hong Kong-based Amper- his allows lithium ions to come in and out of the anode with-
ex Technology to get its powder into cellphones and wearables out destroying the battery in the process.
like smartwatches as early as 2019. Sila also has a collaboration he son of two electrical engineers turned computer pro-
with BMW for potential use in its cars in the early 2020s. grammers, Berdichevsky went to Stanford in 2001 as a me-
here’s a lot at stake. Batteries that can pack more juice into chanical-engineering major because, he says, “both of them
a given space mean electric cars with a better range and cell- wanted me to do computer science, so that was the one thing I
phones that don’t have to be fed so o en. Within a decade, re- wasn’t going to do.”
search irm IDTechEx predicts, the market for just the car bat- At Stanford he met Eerik Hantsoo (now vice president of
teries will be $125 billion a year. equipment engineering at Sila), and the two of them built a
Sila has plenty of rivals. here are several dozen companies two-person solar-powered car that raced from Chicago to Los
redesigning batteries or, like Sila, battery components, most of Angeles in a ten-day competition. he journey would have
them startups but some of them giants like Toyota and vacu- taken a lot longer without the battery Berdichevsky helped de-
um maker Dyson. It’s possible that the battery tournament will sign and build. In 2004 he dropped out of Stanford to become

62 | FORBES ASIA JUNE 30, 2018