Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies

Gene Berdichevsky and his team have been working for over a decade to solve a major problem: Lithium-ion batteries are not getting any better. They power our cell phones and laptops and nearly every other modern, rechargeable device—and at this point have reached their energy-storing limit. This week on How I Built This Lab, Gene discusses a new approach that could eventually make lithium-ion batteries 40% more efficient, unlocking a future where electric vehicles and other battery-powered products are cheaper, recharge faster and last longer on a single charge. This episode was researched and produced by Chris Maccini with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was Neal Rauch. You can follow HIBT on X https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every founder on this show started with a hard question. Not the marketing plan, the 2 a.m. kind. Is this idea any good? Am I the one to build it? Should I quit my job? Anthropic got built the same way. A public benefit corporation founded on one hard question. How do we make sure AI goes well for people? So they asked over 100,000 people their hopes and their fears and are publishing what they find, even the uncomfortable parts. Me? I've got my own hard question about AI. Here it is. If everyone has access to something that can help them write the business plan,

• 0:46Guy Raz?

  build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. We get support from U.S. Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't.

• 1:32Guy Raz?

  Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems. But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands, on the table in rewards you never earned, money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get the US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card. Now, you're earning 3% cash back

• 2:16Guy Raz?

  on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions apply. If you travel often, you'll want to hear about this unprecedented offer. For the first time ever,

• 3:00Guy Raz?

  new Delta SkyMiles Reserve American Express Card members can earn two Delta Comfort Round Trip flights for travel within the 48 contiguous US states, Puerto Rico, or the US Virgin Islands. Plus, you can earn 50,000 bonus miles towards your next getaway. And who doesn't appreciate an elevated airport experience? Delta SkyMiles Reserve Card members get access to the Delta Sky Club, your pre-flight oasis to recharge, with 15 visits and four one-time guest passes each medallion year when flying Delta together. That's up to $950 in annual value. Value estimate based on $50 per visit rate to purchase additional visits

• 3:45Guy Raz?

  or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club. Make every trip feel more rewarding with the car that upgrades your travel. Apply today at delta.com/cardsocial. Offer ends November 4, 2026. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Flights are fulfilled as flight certificates valid for Delta Comfort or Delta Maine to select domestic destinations. Book 21-plus days in advance. Up to $80 per person and taxes and fees apply. Other restrictions apply. When I pull up to a gas pump to fill my car, I'm not thinking about chemistry or engineering. I'm thinking about getting in, filling up, and getting on with my day. And it reminds me a little bit of the founders I talk to on this show, because the best

• 4:27Guy Raz?

  ones obsess over things their customers will never see. Tiny details, invisible improvements, relentless iteration. And not because anyone's watching, but because it makes the product better. That's what the mobile brand does. It engineers fuel the same way great founders engineer their products. Mobile Supreme Plus Premium Gas helps keep engines three times cleaner, which can mean better performance and improved gas mileage. It's for people who care about what's under the hood, even if they never see it. Three times cleaner compared to mobile regular gas in port fuel-injected engines. Actual results may vary. Visit mobilefuels.com for details.

• 5:10Guy Raz?

  Hey, it's Guy here, and before we start the show, I want to tell you about a super exciting thing we are launching on How I Built This. So if you own your own business or trying to get one off the ground, we might put you on the show. Yes, on the show! And when you come on, you won't just be joining me, but you'll be speaking with some of our favorite former guests, who also happen to be some of the greatest entrepreneurs on Earth. And together, we'll answer your most pressing questions about launching and growing your business. Imagine getting real-time branding advice from Sun Bum's Tom Rink, or marketing tips from Fawn Weaver of Uncle Nearest Whiskey.

• 5:51Guy Raz?

  If you'd like to be considered, send us a one-minute message that tells us about your business and the issues or questions that you'd like help with. And make sure to tell us how to reach you. Each week, we'll pick a few callers to join us on this show. You can send us a voice memo at [email protected], or you can call 1-800-433-1298 and leave a message there. That's 1-800-433-1298. And that's it. Hope to hear from you soon. And we are so excited to have you come on the show. And now, on to the show.

• 6:31Guy Raz?

  Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So, a lot of the technology we use today is powered by batteries, specifically lithium-ion batteries. And when they were introduced in the 1990s, they were truly revolutionary. And they've enabled everything from smartphones that can last a full day without being charged, to super-thin laptops and tablets, to electric cars that can go over 300 miles on a single charge. But as with every technology, lithium-ion batteries have limits. And because batteries have gotten so good over the past 30 years, we're basically at the point where traditional lithium-ion batteries are about as good as they're going to get. So that's where today's guest comes

• 7:16Guy Raz?

  in. Gene Berdichevsky and his team at Sila Nanotechnologies have pioneered a new material. It's a composite silicon anode that they say could increase the capacity of lithium-ion batteries by as much as 40%. And their hope is that these batteries can give electric cars significantly more range and make them even cheaper for consumers. Gene Berdichevsky was born in Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union. And he spent much of his childhood in Russia before moving with his parents to Richmond, Virginia, when he was nine years old.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  So back in the Soviet Union, my folks were engineers working on nuclear submarines. So we actually spent a part of my life living north of the Arctic Circle in a little town called Murmansk, which is the northernmost port that doesn't freeze.

• 8:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  So I went from that to a much nicer climate in Virginia. And my folks both ended up being software engineers. So kind of classic, you know, electrical engineer turned software engineer. And, you know, really wanted me to be one too. So that was definitely the one thing I wasn't going to do.

• 8:26Guy Raz?

  I know you ended up at Stanford and you studied mechanical engineering. And while you were there, you were part of a solar car project. Tell me, tell me about that project.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it was a competition that was put on by the Department of Energy, I think since the late eighties. And students built a car from scratch. So it was, you know, maybe a half dozen of us. And we raced it from Chicago to LA on Route 66. And the car used only about two horsepower worth of solar cells and had a little tiny lithium ion battery. And, and so I learned a lot, you know, in my undergrad about lithium ion batteries, electric motors, efficiency, all of those type of things.

• 9:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah, that's more than 2,000 miles from between Chicago and LA. And by the way, how fast did that car go?

• 9:14Speaker 01

  We got it up to about 86 down a hill and you could go about 55 on flat ground. So we were in normal freeway traffic and it was, I mean, it was, it was terrifying. We were amongst 18 wheelers and, you know, one of our best friends is driving and we built this car and like his, his butt's on the line, you know?

• 9:30Guy Raz?

  Wow, that was in like 2004. We are now in 2024, 20 years later. And probably back then, if I would have asked you, you'd have been like, yeah, in 20 years, these are going to be on the streets. People are going to be driving solar powered cars.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  I would not have said that. And, and, you know, sorry to generally disappoint, where I don't think we're going to be driving, you know, purely solar powered cars for a long time. What I did know from that work was that we were all going to be driving electric cars because they were so much more efficient than gasoline, any kind of combustion car. And we could see the batteries getting better year over year, even in the sort of the four years I worked on the project. Batteries got dramatically better. And as part of that, you know, I ended up for an entrepreneurship class, writing a business case about using lithium ion batteries to build electric sports cars that could go 300 mile range on a single charge. You know, if that sounds familiar, that's because, you know, six months later, I heard about some entrepreneurs doing that.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  A little company called Tesla and I decided to drop out and join them.

• 10:33Guy Raz?

  All right. So as you just mentioned, you you find out about this company, this is 2004, called Tesla. And unbeknownst to so many people, it wasn't actually founded by Elon Musk. I mean, he joined relatively early as a major investor and turned it into what it is today. But there were two other founders, I believe. And and probably when you joined in 2004, it was maybe right around the time that Elon Musk joined.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  So Elon was the almost the sole funder of the of the company at the time. But that's right. The CEO at the time I joined was Martin Eberhard. JB Strabill, who'd go on to spend 15 years at CTO, was already there. Mark Tarpenning was another one of the co-founders. And so I worked day to day with them and Elon was was very involved with them at the board level. So I didn't interact with him very much. I was sort of in the back room making, you know, gluing batteries together, making it work.

• 11:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah, tell me about what you were doing because 2004 and you would be at Tesla for four years, right around the time when they released the Roadster. What were you doing? I mean, you were you were presumably working on developing a battery that could power car. How much when you got there in 2004, how much of the technology was already kind of ready to go?

• 11:48Speaker 01

  Almost nothing. So the office was two white rooms in Menlo Park. We spent a lot of time working out of JB's garage where he had a bunch of tools. And the sort of initial prototype of the battery was laptop cells that were literally super glued together. And so that was what we started with. And over the course of four years, we engineered a system that was able to interconnect, cool and safely manage almost 7,000 individual cells and stuff that into the back of, you know, a car frame of the Lotus Elise. So it was it was really clean slate and I got a chance to go from clean slate to production.

• 12:27Guy Raz?

  So, all right, you left Tesla in 2008 before it really kind of became the company it is today, but it was still really exciting. I mean, I remember when that Roadster came out in 2008, it was still kind of a novelty car. But I guess you left to continue your studies, you went back to Stanford. But did you leave with the intention of like, okay, there's something to this battery thing and I want to pursue this?

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I was a mechanical engineer and the thing that vexed me was that battery performance was not improving at the rate that we had seen even sort of in my solar car days just four years before that. And I knew nothing about the chemistry. I knew nothing of what went on inside the battery. And I looked at it and said, look, if these performance curves are projected forward, they're going to stall out and we're not going to have EVs, you know, replace every gas car. So I left with the mission to study material science, physics, thermodynamics, chemistry, all of the disciplines needed to find a breakthrough in batteries. And I did that for a couple of years while also looking for a technology to build a company around.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  So it was very purpose driven and, you know, I think I'm a sucker for the hardest problems. And we had sort of figured out how to make battery packs for EVs. And now the hard problem was making the chemistry better.

• 13:47Guy Raz?

  All right. So let's dive into the problem for a moment. I mean, you're, let's go back to 2011 because you founded the company in 2011. And what was the problem you were trying to solve at the time? Was it the same problem you're still trying to solve today? Or was it a different problem at that time?

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Same problem. And this is, this is one of the beauties of picking the right problem is you get to focus and you don't have to pivot. So the problem we wanted to solve was that, what I saw was that the performance of lithium ion batteries, particularly in energy density, the improvements were slowing down and reaching a plateau. And the reason that was so important isn't because you necessarily need longer range for EVs. But in the long run, you need cheaper batteries. And it turns out, the more energy each battery cell can store, The cheaper the battery pack can be. And the way to think about the reason for that is if every battery cell you have stores twice as much energy, then you need half as many cells.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  And if you need half as many cells, you need less manufacturing equipment, less packaging, less labor, all of those things. So the best way to make EVs affordable long run is to make the highest performing batteries. And that was the thesis that we started with.

• 15:02Guy Raz?

  Okay, let's break down battery technology for a moment because essentially, a lithium ion battery, it stores energy, right? And you'll do a better explanation because you know the science, but essentially, from what I understand, the lithium stores the energy and then over time, that lithium transfers to the, for lack of a better description, the other side of the battery when it spends the energy. Is that more or less right?

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a pretty good start. So there are, as you say, there are two sides to the battery, two really important components. The anode, which hosts the lithium when the battery is charged, and the cathode, which hosts the lithium when the battery is discharged. And so when you're charging up the battery at night, you're forcing all the lithium to move into the anode. And then as you're using it, as you connect it to the motor, the lithium ions kind of run back to the cathode and the electron goes and does a bunch of work in your car. And so the anode side, the material that stores lithium when the battery is charged, is today graphite. In almost every single battery in the world, it's just graphite, same as your pencil lead.

• 16:13Guy Raz?

  And most of that graphite, I think, is extracted in China, right? The majority of it?

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, something like 95% is mined or processed or refined in China. So some of it gets extracted, let's say, in Australia, but then it gets shipped to China to process. So that's right.

• 16:27Guy Raz?

  And what's the problem with graphite? Is there, I mean, my understanding is that, and you've mentioned this, that over the last 10 years, lithium ion batteries have gotten better, not as, maybe not as quickly as we hope, but they've gotten better, they're more efficient, they store more energy, the range of certain cars has been extended. But is there a limitation to what graphite can do and store?

• 16:50Speaker 01

  There is, and it's a thermodynamic limitation. So it is the laws of the universe. It is what God gave us, and there is no getting around it. And we are at that limit in every lithium ion battery today.

• 17:02Guy Raz?

  You cannot push more energy into the graphite, into the existing kind of architecture of a normal battery.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Exactly right. And so with that, we, you know, I went out and I looked at the, frankly, the periodic table of elements, which is small. And there's only a couple of things better than what's been used conventionally in lithium ion batteries. And one of those technologies is a silicon anode technology to replace the graphite anode that's in a lithium ion battery today. And so that, that was the target we picked. But the problem with the silicon anode technology is it had notoriously bad cycle life, meaning you weren't going to get, you know, 300,000 miles on your car. Basically, your battery pack would die after, let's say, 10,000 miles. And it turns out it's a really hard scientific problem. And we thought it would take us sort of five years to solve.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  And it's taken us closer to 10.

• 17:57Guy Raz?

  We're going to take a short break. But when we come back, how Gene and his team tackled the battery lifecycle problem and why they stuck with it for so many years. Stay with us. You're listening to How I Built This Lab.

• 18:17Guy Raz?

  Does your team want a website that looks and feels handcrafted, but is still fast to ship? Well, Framer is built exactly for that. With Framer, you design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts, hosting, and a CMS built in. So the work is production ready from day one, and you can get it done with help from Framer's AI agents. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. Prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. AI agents and humans work together.

• 18:59Guy Raz?

  The agents bring speed and scale, and people bring taste, judgment, and control. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro Annual Plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities. It's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of NetSuite with AI woven into the tools your business already relies on.

• 19:44Guy Raz?

  NetSuite Next surfaces insights exactly when you need them, puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems, and lets you ask complex questions in plain language, like talking to a knowledgeable colleague. But technology is only part of the story. AI is also reshaping how people and teams work together, and that shift is already underway. That's why NetSuite wants to put a new expert-created business guide in your hands today. It's called Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work. And right now, it's yours, absolutely free. Inside, you'll discover how AI could reshape work across your entire organization and how to position your business to prosper from it.

• 20:29Guy Raz?

  If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get NetSuite's free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work, at netsuite.com/built. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/built. netsuite.com/built. Stripe is built for whatever comes next because the pace of change has never been faster than it is right now. New business models, new currencies, and new expectations for speed, reliability, and scale. Stripe builds financial infrastructure that helps businesses start, grow, and operate globally. From payments and billing to fraud protection and cross-border payouts,

• 21:13Guy Raz?

  Stripe is built to support the new pace of commerce. They're trusted by the companies building at the frontier, from 86% of the Forbes AI 50 to global leaders like Salesforce and OpenAI. In fact, more than 1.6% of global GDP flows through Stripe, with Stripe's users processing a combined $1.9 trillion last year. So if you're already thinking about what's next for your business, see what's possible at stripe.com.

• 21:55Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guest is Gene Berdichevsky, co-founder of Seela Nanotechnologies. So this is interesting because back in 2011, when you founded this company, you were trying to solve a problem that really did not yet exist in a sense because electric vehicle adoption at that point was still very tiny. And so you would need people to essentially buy electric cars with a graphite anode in the battery before people started to realize that you actually needed to solve really this problem needed to be solved. And that's where we are today. I mean, is that fair to say? Like, you were working on a solution before the market was ready for that solution?

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Escape to where the puck's going to be, right?

• 22:37Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  I mean, you have to do that. And you have to understand what the incumbent technology is going to do. I think we saw this in the solar industry, for example. There was this explosion of new solar cell chemistries in the late 2000s. And the problem was they didn't account for how good conventional solar cell chemistry would get. And that got cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And we ended up with a bunch of bankrupt solar cell companies. Now, what we understood, what I understood, is graphite had nowhere to get better, full stop. And so that was part of the...

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Calculus in starting this company is saying like, look, I know this has limitation. Five years from now, people are going to want better batteries and and so we have to solve this this chemistry problem.

• 23:29Guy Raz?

  All right, so you, all the way back in 2011, you you had a hunch that there was a better solution, right, to graphite, and that is silicon. And when I think of silicon, I mean, we're thinking about the same material that is in a computer chip.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Yep, and a solar cell, too. So it's a it's a it's a pretty magical material.

• 23:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah, so tell me about about this material and how you kind of came upon this as a is a better option than graphite.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so as I mentioned before, the periodic table of elements is quite small, and it's well understood that silicon could be a lot better at storing lithium ions. And to give you a sense of how much better, the thermodynamic limit of graphite, which is made entirely out of carbon atoms, is you need six carbon atoms to store a single atom of lithium. Whereas with silicon, you can take a single atom of silicon and store four lithium atoms. So that means instead of six to one, you're one to four. So silicon is 24 times atomically better at hosting lithium. So that's not secret. That's been known for a long, long time.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  The problem is silicon is so good at storing lithium that when you charge the battery, because four new atoms come in and react with every single silicon atom you have, it expands really dramatically. And that expansion causes huge mechanical issues in the battery. And those mechanical issues lead to chemical issues, lead to degradation mechanisms, and your battery dies in like 10 or 100 cycles traditionally.

• 25:06Guy Raz?

  All right, so you knew theoretically that this was a better material, but you but but you also knew that. As of that moment in 2011, nobody had figured out how to make it work. It was too volatile. And so you decide, I'm going to tackle this. I'm going to figure out how we can make silicon work. And that project you thought you could do within about five years at that point.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  That's what we thought. And there's an important other thread to that story, which is one of my co-founders, Professor Gleb Yushin, who from about 2007, 2008, he had a background in physics, came into batteries and said, oh, interesting. You know, here's this problem, again, well-understood problem. I think I have some ideas of how to make entirely new class of materials, how to structure silicon into a composite form that will solve this problem. And, you know, he published a few papers as a professor at Georgia Tech. I read some of those papers. I thought they were quite insightful and, you know, and we met up through another professor friend, mutual friend of ours. And it turned out he was really itching to start a company.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  And so it was, you know, I understood the problem from the vehicle side. I understood the problem from the battery side. He really understood the solutions that you could bring to this from a material science perspective. And so, you know, I think neither of us sort of understood quite how hard the other half of it was. And so I think together with another co-founder of ours, also an ex-Tesla colleague, you know, the three of us kind of said, yeah, we think we can figure this out in five years.

• 26:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So you and Gleb basically join forces. And I know you, essentially, you had to raise some money to begin the process. You raised about $5 million back in, I think, back in 2011. Tell me what the pitch was to investors. You said, we are going to build a better battery that does X, Y, and Z. What were you saying to investors?

• 27:10Speaker 01

  So we told investors, we're going to make a battery that improves energy density, meaning how much energy the cell can store, which will either enable us to increase range for EVs or lower costs. It'll also enable us to reduce charge times, which this chemistry has a side benefit of. And we could apply that same chemistry into consumer electronics. Because graphite's in every lithium ion battery. It's in your cellphone, it's in the laptop, it's in your car. And so we can apply this chemistry across different markets. And we could start in consumer, where we could get to production much faster. And then we could scale into cars, where the opportunity is just, just mind bogglingly large.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  So really, from day one, we laid out the plan that we executed. And you know, we, 10 years in, we got into our first consumer electronics device. And you know, it'll be sort of around five years more from then to get into, you know, a first car that folks can buy.

• 28:09Guy Raz?

  All right, let's back up because, as you mentioned, it would take 10 years before your, your battery essentially was in a, is it was in a consumer product, which is the Whoop Smart Band that, it's a, it's a fitness tracker essentially. But before we get there, for that, you know, 10 year period, 2011, 2021, I read that you, you went through something like 80,000 iterations in trying to develop this, right? Because you, you were essentially, this was not off the shelf technology. You guys had to figure out the science behind this. So walk me through a little bit of what you did during that 10 year period. Because that is, man, that's a, that must be, you have to have a lot of patience, right?

• 28:53Guy Raz?

  Waiting for that moment where it's going to work.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the best way I can, I can summarize it is, I think innovation, this is a slight twist on, on what you've heard before, is 1%. Inspiration and 99% iteration. So it's all about how fast you iterate on your ideas. It matters how smart you are to start. It matters how good of a, you know, professor you've got on the team. But what matters more than anything is the machine to drive that invention and those that turn those ideas over and discard the bad ones as quickly as possible. And so in this case, because we were inventing an entirely new materials class, we also had to invent the processing techniques for synthesizing those materials.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  And so the first thing we did wasn't to get in the lab and start cooking materials. The first thing we did was build a bunch of reactors to do the synthesis work. And instead of doing it in a typical grad school fashion where it kind of held together with duct tape and baling wire, we built really nice automated machines that would be just bulletproof and execute every recipe that we gave them to synthesize these materials with extreme precision. We outfitted them with hundreds of sensors and we built a dozen of these machines pretty quickly. And then we honestly just turned the crank, right?

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Ideas in, results out, discard the bad ideas, recycle the good ones, put them together and iterate, iterate, iterate.

• 30:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I mean, we've had RJ Scorringe on the show from Rivian and, you know, they knew that this was going to take a long time. And it took them about 10 years before they had a vehicle to sell, which is a long time when you've got investors and you've got, you know, people working on this. You said that it took a few years before you could start to see the light at the end of the tunnel, which would still take another six or seven years. How did you just persevere? I mean, were you sure this was going to work?

• 31:01Speaker 01

  No, certainly not in the early days. And so, you know, we talked about this explicitly. In the early days, when it's a science project, you have to decide what you're going to measure yourself by. If you're measuring yourself only by the result, then you will never take on something where you might fail. And so, you know, you have to measure the inputs. And the inputs are, did we work as hard as we possibly could? Did we, you know, come up with the best ideas we could? And then do we do it with integrity and respect? Because if you sort of, you know, if you lose your integrity, it sort of, the whole thing falls apart. And so, I think we were all committed to the mission.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  And, you know, we all believed we could get there. We certainly believed we could crack the code. That, you know, the thermodynamics said it was not impossible, which is all you have to know. Once you know it's not impossible, it's really just a question of how long and how hard is it going to get?

• 32:04Guy Raz?

  I'm curious, because a lot of times founders of startups will ask me, when is it time to give up? You know, and, you know, you could have, there was a world where you could have thrown yourself into this and the science just wouldn't have, would not have worked out. And it might have been 10 years of your life that you would have devoted to this thing that didn't work out. Was there ever a moment in that 10-year period where you thought, maybe I should just take my talent and try something different?

• 32:35Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 32:36Guy Raz?

  Never?

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Nope. And I think it's, look, I think this problem is so important that it's worth doing. But, you know, if you told me on day one that you'd be sitting there, 13 years in, you know, you've got a consumer product out, you're still years away from a car, I don't know if I would have signed up for it, but that doesn't matter, right? When you're, when you're in it and you can see how you're going to get there. And I think this is true of a lot of entrepreneurs. I've, you know, I've heard many of the greatest entrepreneurs say, look, you know, if I knew how hard this was going to be, not sure I would have signed up. But the other part is, you know, I I'm convinced that if if not us, who? The world is not, in technical terms, a state function.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Meaning, in a state function, if something should exist, it becomes that. Just because the world should be electric does not make it electric. The world is a path function. I mean, I I think about like an alternate history. Imagine we go back to eighteen nineties and someone figures out how to put together a lithium ion battery, you know, with with like much cruder tools than in in the nineteen nineties. And today, we're all driving electric cars. What an amazing world that might have been. But the world doesn't go electric because it should. It goes electric because of, you know, I mean, people like Elon and Martin and JB. It goes electric, you know, hopefully because of people like us. And I think when you realize that you're at the forefront, it almost feels obligatory to finish it.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  I I don't think it it is, but it, you know, it almost becomes that and, you know, pushing, trying to make a small dent in the universe.

• 34:16Guy Raz?

  We're gonna take another quick break, but just ahead, how Seles technology could supercharge the electric vehicle market. Stick around, you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

• 34:35Speaker 02

  Football is back and PrizePix is bringing out their best offer yet. New users who sign up will get one hundred and fifty dollars in lineups if you win your first five dollar lineup. That's right, if you win your first five dollar lineup, you'll get one hundred and fifty dollars in lineups. On PrizePix, you simply pick two to six players, pick more or less on their stat projections and submit your lineup. Then sweat it out as you watch your picks play out live. It's the best way to get more locked in on game day. Make all the picks you want this football season, all in the same app. And now PrizePix is available nationwide. So what are you waiting for? Lock in for kickoff because everyone and everything is on PrizePix. What you want?

• 35:20Speaker 03

  Download the PrizePix app today and use code WONDERY, that's code WONDERY, to get one hundred and fifty dollars installing in lineups if you win your first five dollar lineup. PrizePix, run your game.

• 35:35Speaker 04

  Confidence, it's listening to your gut. It's moving forward even when the path ahead is unclear. For nearly 160 years, Pacific Life has helped people keep their promises, building confidence for generations. Whether you're confident in your financial future or just beginning to envision it, we're here to help. Ask a financial professional how. Pacific Life, the power of a promise. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska. And in New York, Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona.

• 36:14Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So after 10 years of research and development, Jean and Cela are finally ready to launch their silicone anode in a consumer product. And in 2021, they worked with a company called Whoop to design a fitness tracking device with an improved battery.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  You know, they had a certain amount of size, Whoop did, for the battery in this device. And it's mostly battery. There's sensors and there's a microprocessor, but there's no display, there's no screen. So it's probably half of the device is a battery. We helped them, you know, improve their battery performance by about 20% relative to the prior generation. Because the device is mostly battery, you made it a lot more compact and allowed them to stuff more sensors in, and allowed them to stuff more compute in. And really importantly, it gave them a five-day battery life. So you didn't have to recharge it from Monday to Friday, which is pretty cool. So we were a small part of that. They had to piece together a lot of innovations. But we enabled them to make a product that's better

• 37:16Speaker 01

  and that more consumers could buy. And the same will be true for EVs. We helped them make a product that's better, that more consumers want.

• 37:25Guy Raz?

  All right, so you've proven that this battery technology can, you know, work on a small scale in consumer products, right? It's being used today in the Whoop fitness tracker. And now you're also at the point where you're ready to start working with car companies, right?

• 37:41Speaker 01

  That's right. So we have a supply agreement with Mercedes and they plan to bring us into their electric vehicle lineup. They say mid-decade, starting with the electric G-Wagon, the EQG. And so we will be offered, I think, as an upgrade pack. They'll have a graphite-based battery without us. And then they'll have a silicon-based battery with us. And then we also made a announcement that we signed a supply agreement with Panasonic in December. And so we're also working with them to bring our batteries into their customers' electric cars.

• 38:16Guy Raz?

  All right. So let's talk about what the battery can do right now. All right. You've got a G-Wagon, an electric G-Wagon, let's say, and I don't know what the range is on it. But what, what does this new battery bring to the table? How does it improve the vehicle from a consumer standpoint?

• 38:32Speaker 01

  So we tell our customers that we can deliver for them a 20% increase in, in energy density, which they can translate to 20% longer range. So if you've got an EV with 250 miles of range, we get you to 300, without having to redesign everything, without having to have a, you know, battery pack that has to replace your backseat. It just fits into the exact same space where your current battery is. And so if, and if you've got 300 mile range already, then we can get you to 360. And so that's where the technology is today. And then over the next few years, we'll get that to a 30% improvement. Eventually, we think we can get that to a 40% improvement over state-of-the-art graphite chemistries.

• 39:13Guy Raz?

  So 40% improvement. And so from a consumer's standpoint, if this plays out as you imagine, you're talking about cheaper EVs, longer-range EVs? If, if this technology is adopted by, you know, the average vehicle?

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. But the other thing is, there's a lot of consumers that are still willing to pay a premium for electric vehicles, right? Most of the cars sold in America average over forty five thousand dollars. But they certainly, there's a lot of consumers, especially as you start moving from the early adopters to the mass market, that don't want to think about recharge times and, you know, worrying about, you know, if I forget to plug in on a Saturday night, then I'm not going to be able to get my kids to soccer practice on a Sunday morning, like,

• 40:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  that's a problem. And we need to make it sort of forgettable. And so there's a couple other factors that we can make better. One is we decrease the recharge time. So imagine, not only do you have four hundred mile range on your, you know, mid-priced DV, but you can also recharge it in, say, five minutes, or seven minutes, or ten minutes.

• 40:22Guy Raz?

  Why does it charge faster?

• 40:25Speaker 01

  So it's a, it's a nuance of the chemistry. But essentially, when you use graphite, because you need so much of it to store the lithium, it makes for a really thick electrode, and it takes a long time for lithium ions to get all the way to sort of the bottom of the graphite particles, if you will, as they move from, from that cathode to the anode. When you use silicon, your electrode is much, much thinner. And so the lithium can move much quicker to the sort of rearmost particles in the, in the battery, if you will. And so, you know, we, we think, especially for low-cost EVs, that's going to be a game changer. So imagine you've got a two hundred mile, twenty five thousand dollar car, right?

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Maybe you can't afford the forty five thousand dollar, four hundred mile version. But if it only takes you seven minutes or eight minutes to go from ten percent to eighty, which is kind of the typical, you know, way that EVs measure charge speed, then you can pretty confidently just like cruise on whatever road trip you're going on. And as long as you have a good network, you pull over, you go use the restroom at the rest stop, and you're right back on the road. I mean, you know, it's already true that you don't have time for lunch if you're using a, a supercharger. This would be sort of almost as fast as a gas station.

• 41:39Guy Raz?

  All right, you've come up, you've worked on the technology for the past 10-plus years. What about the actual batteries? Are you going to produce batteries and sell batteries?

• 41:51Speaker 01

  Great question. And this actually goes back to the original founding idea. One thing we realized is that the battery makers were going to get really, really large, and they were already extraordinarily experienced. So they were, you know, 20 years of history at Panasonic making batteries.

• 42:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  And so we believed that it was foolish to reinvent how the batteries produced or try to compete with them directly. And so instead, we make just this material, just this anode powder, and we ship that, you know, in bags to giga factories around the world, and they integrate it just like they would graphite. And every battery coming out of their factory is better.

• 42:30Guy Raz?

  So I know that you're, you've acquired a production facility, this is in Washington State, and that facility is going to be making the silicon. It's not going to, it's basically going to be making this powder.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  So we acquired a site, land and a building, that's it. And we are building, you know, if you remember, all of our equipment is custom developed to make this new class of materials at the R and D scale. Well, it turns out it also needs to be custom developed to make this material at automotive scale. And so we're building a massive, you know, plant. Ultimately, it will be several billion dollars of investment. The first phase is a couple hundred million of investment that will produce, again, ultimately several million electric cars worth of product. Today, we're starting with supplying, you know, the G-Wagon and the Panasonic contract and a couple other customers that we've signed up.

• 43:23Guy Raz?

  We, we hear a lot about like shortages, right, of materials that will make it very difficult to increase production of lithium ion batteries and so on. So does this help solve some of that challenge? I mean, if, if silicon is, unlike graphite, it's plentiful, it's available everywhere. It's, and you're talking about a US-based company. It can be mined in the US, right? It's, does this change that, you know, that equation? Or is the whole idea of a shortage kind of a, a overblown?

• 43:54Speaker 01

  It does change the equation. You know, it democratizes where you can produce anode materials and there's a lot from a national security standpoint and from a regional security standpoint, there's a lot of good reasons that we want production of anode materials in the US. Europe wants production of anode materials in Europe and by the way, and cathode materials and separators and electrolytes, all the key components and the batteries themselves. So this is the energy sector of the 21st century and just like, you know, it really, really mattered where energy was produced in the 20th century and we fought wars over it, we should really get ahead of the curve and ensure our own energy security by having domestic supply of anodes. And if we're going to do that, rather than trying to compete

• 44:39Speaker 01

  on a unlevel playing field and try to catch up to what, you know, a dominant position that has been established in China on graphite, we should do it with new technologies where we have the advantage. And to your point, they require dramatically less mining, they require really much less labor, these technologies are much more efficient, they require clean energy, which we have in Washington State where we're building our factory from the Columbia River. And, you know, they require innovation, which America is incredible at. It is our best asset. And so what's critical is that not only do we lean in to displace some of the shortages and as a country, but we do it with new technologies, which

• 45:23Speaker 01

  is our competitive edge. And we end up in the lead for 21st century energy. You know, it'll take 10 years, but just like we got there with oil and gas through technologies like fracking, we should get there in batteries through technologies like silicon anodes and others.

• 45:38Guy Raz?

  And do you expect that graphite is, you know, will be a thing of the past and lithium batteries in 10 years? Like, is it just going to be like a sort of an obsolete part of the technology? Or do you think people will still use it?

• 45:53Speaker 01

  I think people will still use it in some places. You know, I think you'll have the production assets. It'll be cheaper to run them than it is certainly to build new production assets. So, um, and I would point you to nickel metal hydride batteries. They're still in use in a lot of places. Um, they're still in use in a lot of hybrid cars, for example.

• 46:11Guy Raz?

  Cause they're cheap, but they're cheaper, right?

• 46:13Speaker 01

  They're cheaper. They're also just, they're robust. They're designed for that application. It's not a big enough application for a new entrant to go after. So it, it does take time, but you know, the technologies do sunset. You know, nickel cadmium isn't used anywhere anymore. Um, you know, lead acid is still used quite broadly. Uh, and that's, you know, that's a hundred year old piece of technology. So I, I, I think there'll, there'll be a place for graphite, but I, I, I would say in 20 years silicon should be able to replace it in every nook and cranny. Uh, but in 10, I suspect it's still, you know, it's going to be a one-way pendulum. Just like in 10 years, there'll still be gas cars out there for these industrial, uh, sectors to turn over. It takes a lot

• 46:56Speaker 01

  longer than people realize because you have built the assets and you know, shutting them down, you only do in very rare occasions. So more importantly, all the new assets being built, all the new battery factories coming online, we want them to use silicon technology. All the new car factories, right? We want all the new car platforms to be electric, but that doesn't mean you sort of switch overnight.

• 47:19Guy Raz?

  Um, clearly you, you've gotten the attention of, of investors because you've raised hundreds of millions of dollars and you know, I think your company is valued at two, three billion? I can't remember what, what, what was the latest public valuation?

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Uh, the last financing, yeah, was over $3 billion and we've raised close to a billion now.

• 47:38Guy Raz?

  Uh, which is kind of mind blowing, right? When you think about that number, but it takes a lot of money. I mean, and you've gotten grants from the US government because of this, the, uh, infrastructure investment jobs act. I mean, there are funds that are designed to incentivize companies to build out things in the United States, especially around green technologies. So, um, that's been helpful. Um, you know, when do you expect to be producing your material at scale and, and really powering, let's say a significant percentage of EV batteries around the world?

• 48:17Speaker 01

  So I've learned to, to, that big things take time.

• 48:22Guy Raz?

  You sure have, yes.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  So I don't, I don't make proclamations like, next year, we'll have done all of this, all of these things. We have much more realistic timelines now that we've managed to hold. And right now, we're planning to be complete with the current phase of the factory, what we call Phase One, at the end of this year. And we'll spend the first half of next year bringing that online very carefully to make very high-quality product. And we'll begin to ship that product in the second half of 2025 to our customers. And we expect that, you know, consumers will be able to get their, the first cars with our technology in 2026.

• 49:01Guy Raz?

  It's been a long road and still some road ahead, but pretty awesome. I mean, it's, when, when and if this is sort of the, the standard, it sounds like it's gonna, it's gonna have a huge impact on, on our lives.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  I hope so. You know, make the world a little better place than, than as we found it. And I think the decades that it'll have taken will feel, will feel worth it.

• 49:27Guy Raz?

  Gene Berdichevsky, thank you so much.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Guy, thanks. Thanks for having me.

• 49:33Guy Raz?

  That's Gene Berdichevsky, co-founder and CEO of Seela Nanotechnologies.

• 49:40Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. This episode was researched and produced by Chris Messini with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was Neil Rouch. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Carla Estevez, J.C. Howard, Kerry Thompson, Catherine Seifer, Malia Agudelo, Niva Grant, and Sam Paulson. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This Lab.