News about batteries

Holyvolt, a Stockholm-based battery-materials startup, has raised $45 million in all-equity funding from Fifth Wall, Zone II, CC.VC and several angel investors, valuing the company at $245 million according to a person familiar with the deal. COO Steven Prast, a former Tesla manufacturing leader, argues that China makes about 85% of the world's cathode active material and about 80% of battery cells, so the West cannot win by competing on the chemistries China already dominates. Holyvolt merged with San Diego's Wildcat Discovery Technologies, whose high-throughput platform has run more than 225 projects for more than 85 customers and tested over 500,000 cells in 18 years. Based on a customer case study, the company says its lab, paired with AI models trained on that data, works about 10 times faster than conventional R&D. Its first output is DRX (disordered rocksalt), a cathode family with neither nickel nor cobalt that Prast says delivers NMC-like performance.

The video traces the history of electric vehicles, noting that by 1900 about a third of all U.S. cars were electric before they vanished for nearly a century. It highlights milestones including Robert Anderson's battery-powered carriage in the 1830s, London's electric taxis, and Tesla's first Roadster, which packed in 6,831 laptop batteries. The video presents the current era as an EV renaissance rather than the birth of electric cars.

The article notes that US inflation of 3.7% in September has drawn attention to energy costs and to battery companies serving cars, homes and the power grid. It profiles Tesla (TSLA), which generates about US$90.8 billion from automotive and US$12.8 billion from energy generation and storage, with a market cap of US$1.49 trillion. Contemporary Amperex Technology (SZSE:300750) makes EV batteries and grid-scale storage batteries, generating about CN¥521.7 billion from batteries and battery systems, with a market cap of CN¥1,356.6 billion. The piece notes that 502 more companies in the same battery technology screen are not covered, and raises scenarios about Tesla's storage margins and CATL's scale-driven pricing power.