Spencer Gore has a battery start. But he doesn’t want his batteries to end up in electric vehicles, at least not yet.
“There are a lot of interesting parts of the automotive industry that are underserved today that are faster than, say, the traction battery in electric vehicles,” he told TechCrunch. Take the traditional 12 volt lead-acid battery found under the hood of every fossil fuel vehicle on the road today. It’s still a huge market, surpassed only by lithium-ion production capacity a few years ago.
“There, we’re still relying on 150-year-old technology,” Gore said.
In contrast, Gore’s company, Pedestal Materials, uses a chemistry invented about a decade ago. While he won’t divulge the details, he says it’s similar to what’s in most EVs today with one major difference: no lithium.
Instead, Bedrock Materials is developing a sodium-ion battery that promises to be dramatically cheaper than lithium-ion. The expected cost savings stem from the abundance of sodium: Earth has approx 1,000 more sodium rather than lithium.
However, challenges remain. Sodium-ion batteries don’t hold as much energy as lithium-ion, and while they’re cheaper than lithium-ion, the difference hasn’t been enough to entice hesitant automakers. Formulations that store enough energy to induce lithium ions have proven fragile, though Gore said his company’s chemistry addresses that problem.
Ultimately, Gore would like to see Bedrock Materials contract for EV batteries. But he argues that it makes more sense to launch a product first in a more stagnant market, such as starter batteries for fossil-fueled cars and trucks. “It’s classic ‘disruption from below.’ Start with something that’s frankly worse, but is cheaper, and go from there as the technology improves.”
To demonstrate that sodium ion chemistry can replace lead-acid in starter batteries, Bedrock Materials is producing materials for third-party testing. To fund the venture, it recently raised a $9 million seed round, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. The round was led by Trucks Venture Capital, Refactor Capital and Version One Ventures.
The startup also recently opened an R&D facility in Chicago, a city that hasn’t been home to many battery startups. But Gore, who worked at Tesla and battery materials startup Enovix, led the company to Illinois in part because the cost of living is significantly cheaper than in Silicon Valley.
At Enovix, he noticed a trend among the recruits who stuck with him: “We basically had a two-way distribution of talent from fresh new grads making it with five roommates, and then vice presidents who don’t even live here — they just fly in for the week and I fly back home “, he said.
Battery scientists, on the other hand, tend to be mid-career. They typically have PhDs and postdocs, and by the time they get a job in industry, “they’re 31 years old,” Gore said. “In the Bay Area, the math just wouldn’t work for them.”
It also doesn’t hurt that suburban Chicago is home to Argonne National Laboratories, where years of research have greatly improved sodium-ion batteries. Now, Gore believes it’s ready to hit the market.
Other battery makers agree that sodium-ion’s time has come. Chinese battery maker CATL has been producing sodium-ion batteries for a few years, and China’s BYD and Sweden’s Northvolt have announced their own plans to add sodium-ion production lines. By the end of the decade, 150 gigawatt hours of production capacity, most of it in China, is slated to come online.
China’s interest in sodium ion should be a wake-up call to other producers, Gore said. “We saw Chinese cell makers move very quickly to commercialize sodium-ion technology, and we saw how they left non-Chinese cell makers in the dust when it came to lithium iron phosphate. The obvious question is, will this happen again with sodium ions?’ he said. He said companies like Panasonic and LG have learned their lesson. “They don’t want to be left in the dust again.”
