Page 65 - Forbes - Asia (June 2018)

BATTERIES

Scaling up: Cofounders Gene
Berdichevsky (left), Gleb Yushin
(center) and Alex Jacobs with part
of the production line that will
make enough of their innovative
battery material to power 20 million
smartwatches.
At Sutter Hill, Berdi-
chevsky investigated many
technologies, but the one that
caught his eye came from Gleb
Yushin, a Russian émigré run-
ning a nanotechnology lab at
Georgia Tech. Along with Alex
Jacobs, they founded Sila Nan-
otechnologies in Atlanta under
the university’s aegis. Sila spent
the next few years develop-
ing recipes for making an-
odes, testing 30,000 variations
in areas like temperature and
inputs. It moved to Alameda,
California, in 2014.
Now it’s time to produce.
Sila is in the midst of building
several reactors for a new prod-
uct line that it hopes will cook
up enough powder annu ally for
6 million amp-hours’ worth of
batteries. hat would be enough
black magic for 2.3 million
phone batteries. If Sila can de-
the seventh employee at Tesla. liver on its 40% performance promise, those batteries will pack
It was while testing a variety of lithium-ion batteries for the 14 watt-hours of energy into a space that now contains 10. But,
Tesla Roadster that he noticed performance improvements in Berdichevsky concedes, “there’s just a huge amount of engineer-
batteries were slowing down. he battery business needed a ing and execution work that has to happen.”
breakthrough. wearables and phones. Sila intends to use the knowledge and
he immediate market will be for batteries that go into
TIMOTHY ARCHIBALD FOR FORBES engineering in 2010, focusing on materials science. Later, as revenues gained there to get into the much juicier business of
Berdichevsky went back to Stanford and got a master’s in
entrepreneur-in-residence at Sutter Hill Ventures, he began
car batteries. “he drop-in nature means we don’t have to build
to think about how to build not just a better battery but also a
a billion-dollar Gigafactory,” Berdichevsky says, referring to
better battery company. he eicient solution might be to make
ambitious expansions by Tesla and some Chinese outits. “We
a component instead of the whole thing.
can work with the people who are going to do that anyway.” F
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