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Bloomberg
Sila Nanotechnologies, a San Francisco Bay-area battery startup, is getting an additional $45 million in funding and has hired two new executives, including a former Tesla Inc manager who helped build the electric-car company’s relationship with battery-cell makers.
Bill Mulligan, a former vice president at solar-panel maker SunPower Corp, joins Sila as its first chief operating office, the Alameda, California-based company said in a statement.
Kurt Kelty, a former Panasonic Corp and Tesla executive who then joined vertical-farming startup Plenty Inc, was named vice president of automotive.
The $45 million investment from Canada Pension Plan Investment Board brings the company’s total funding to $340 million, including an earlier contribution from Daimler AG. Daimler and BMW are automotive partners.
Sila is working to improve the performance of lithium-ion batteries, the key component of electric cars. Measured as kilowatt hours per kilogram or liter, energy density determines range: The more watt hours you have, the more miles the car can travel on a single charge. Low-cost, high-energy-density batteries are the holy grail.
The basic guts of a battery include a negatively charged anode, a positively charged cathode and the electrolyte. As a battery discharges, ions flow from the anode to the cathode, flowing through the electric circuit to releasing.
Sila is creating a silicon-based battery anode that’s fundamentally different chemistry than the graphite used in the most commercially popular anode material.
Berdichevsky was employee No. 7 at Tesla, where he worked on company’s first electric car, the Roadster, and was an entrepreneur in residence at Sutter Hill Ventures.