The start-up Adden Energy, founded by scientists at Harvard University, is developing a new type of solid-state battery for electric vehicles and has now announced that it has received a technology licence and closed a seed funding round of 5.15 million US dollars.

According to Adden Energy, the self-developed lithium metal battery achieves a charging time of only three minutes in the laboratory and a service life of more than 10,000 cycles. The prototype also has a high energy density and material stability “that overcomes the safety problems of some other lithium batteries”. The results have been published in Nature and other journals.

In other news, the startup announces it has received an exclusive technology licence from Harvard University’s Office of Technology Development (OTD) to scale solid-state battery technology. In addition, a good US$5 million has come in via a seed funding round. The round was led by Primavera Capital Group. Rhapsody Venture Partners and MassVentures also participated. The licence and venture funding will enable the startup to scale up the lab prototype to commercial use of a solid-state lithium metal battery, according to a statement.

Thus, the startup plans to first scale the battery to a palm-sized pouch cell and then turn it into a full-fledged vehicle battery in the next three to five years. “If you want to electrify vehicles, a solid-state battery is the way to go,” says Xin Li, associate professor of materials science at Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). “We set out to commercialize this technology because we do see our technology as unique compared to other solid-state batteries. We have achieved in the lab 5,000 to 10,000 charge cycles in a battery’s lifetime, compared with 2,000 to 3,000 charging cycles for even the best in class now, and we don’t see any fundamental limit to scaling up our battery technology. That could be a game changer.”

Adden Energy was founded in 2021 by Xin Li along with William Fitzhugh and Luhan Ye, who were both involved in developing the technology as PhD students in Li’s Harvard lab. Fred Hu, founder and chairman of Primavera Capital, is also a founder of Adden Energy.

Will you be going public on the stock market?

Looking to see if news letters are sent out and how sign up in order to keep up with this developing technology..

Thanks for asking Ray! You can find a tool to sign up for our newsletter in the top right corner of the screen. We will continue to cover Adden and the rest of the e-mobility industry as news emerges both here and summarized in our newsletter.

Sounds great, where is the electric used to charge the batteries going to come from? I’m all for being considerate of our environment but from seeing how land is strip mined to obtain the necessary materials to build these batteries, and no clear answers on how old worn out batteries will be discarded without negative impact on our environment, makes me wonder if this is truly the best alternative.

A simple Google search can answer your bot-style inquiry.

Cobalt Lithium ion batteries are comprised of cobalt, nickel, copper, and aluminum. Each of these metals can be recycled and reused. These other metals are what make the cost of recycling lithium ion batteries worth the hassle. In fact, it is cheaper to recycle cobalt than to mine for it.

But what a Google search doesn’t tell, is the amount of energyvtat is necessary to mine for these materials, how environmental friendly these miners are,etc,etc….

There are still too many open questions to be answered.

Please note: we should all cheer and support the development of civilization, but also be realistic begore we declare that a new holy graal has been found.

Throw it out in space obviously it’s infinite.

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