For those dismissing this as a yet another lab breakthrough without substance, the article is about this company getting quite substantial funding for what looks like a pretty nice series A funding round.
It looks like there are some serious investors involved that clearly believe that these guys know what they are doing. They presumably did their due diligence. That generally means this company used some seed funding to do proof of concepts and prototypes that are showing some promise.
In any case, 20M is nice but clearly nowhere near enough for mass producing stuff like this. So, what this means is this company just received funding to do more R&D from a nice consortium of investors that would clearly benefit from having a stake in a company like that if it had at all any chance of succeeding. Presumably there are still some hard problems left to work on otherwise, we'd be reading about some company investing billions to actually build the factories to mass produce this.
Since there are now several companies working on solid state batteries, the chances seem pretty good that one of them will eventually come up with viable products that can be produced at a quality, scale and cost that is interesting.
IMHO that will likely happen second half of the next decade or so. One application where this stuff might be applied early might be electric planes. That's a use case where improved energy density and safety is so valuable that even a very expensive solid state battery might still be interesting.
Funding and/or “serious investors” or even serious people on the board or as advisors means literally nothing. Theranos checked literally all of those boxes, and even got a visit from the Vice President and an award.
And they never even had a product that worked, and what devices they did have were fraudulent.
Having high profile people involved should never have been relevant to the quality of product coming from a company, but now that we are all aware of Theranos is should be absolutely clear to everyone that it is meaningless. It is likewise meaningless to make claims without backing it up with results from at least an independent third party if not making devices available to multiple technically competent reporters.
Two important qualitative differences from Theranos:
- Spinoff from battery research program at a University, not a bachelor degree dropout
- Investors are technical
So no, Theranos did not have any "serious" investors if using the definition of "serious" as those that are technically competent/know how to evaluate the technology. It's possible of course that it's all still a scam like Theranos, but more likely if this doesn't pan out it's going to be some limitation with the underlying tech, market adoption, competence running the company rather than outright fraud.
Theranos is one example. But there are many examples of where funding and corporate investment is a sign the company has something serious and industry changing. The point is that without statistics both of us are just dealing in effectively anecdotes.
And the idea that independent third parties need to be involved is simply not true. (1) They already have car manufacturers willing to validate the technology (and they are often quite conservative) and (2) this company isn't at the point yet where their technology is being commercially sold.
Also in the Theranos case there really was only one major customer i.e. Wallgreens who then failed to do proper due diligence. Here you have multiple car manufacturers involved who specialise in vetting new technology for mass production.
We're in a post-Theranos world. Companies are going to be getting a little extra scrutiny.
Also, as near as I can tell, Theranos got their later investment rounds by being willing to wildly lie. IIRC, they claimed something like $100e6 of revenues where the actual number was approx $100e3 [1]. That is probably going to (slowly) lead to criminal liability for some of the principals.
Here (as parent mentioned) you have battery companies investing in a battery company.
Which was in turn in a post-Enron world. The one sure way to make sure that crap can keep happening is to pretend that something has really changed, so it can’t happen again. It can, stay vigilant.
Counterexamples do not imply the inverse of the original claim is true, just that the original claim may not be a universal truth. (And of course, the OP never claimed it was, your claim of "literally nothing" is more akin to making a universal claim.)
The only serious investor in Theranos was Tim Draper, who gave Holmes about $200k in initial seed funding, and largely because she was a friend of the family who Draper has known since she was a kid. Holmes went around to every major Silocon valley VC firm and every life sciences VC firm, but they did their due diligence and after consulting with experts every one of them said "I think I'll pass on this one."
Following that initial seed funding from DFJ, all of Theranos' early stage funding came from fly-by-night wannabe venture capitalists. A123 systems definitely does not fall into that category.
Yeah, they think it's a 1 in 50 chance of working. Or whatever metric they have that results in $20M being invested. Pretty small beans for a technology that would change the world. To me that says it's just interesting enough that they don't want to see it die.
Series A funding usually means a certain level of viability and risk. Presumably with battery prototypes it is pretty easy to assess if the thing exists at all in some kind of prototype form or not and whether it works at all. When I say due diligence, I'm assuming that stuff was checked and triple checked by investors.
Also, Theranos owed a large part of their funding to the fact that the CEO was cute & female. Stuff like that is super sexist of course but that doesn't make it any less true. Investors were a bit less critical than they might have been and the company certainly got a lot more press and exposure due to this than would otherwise have been the case. Not all investors are idiots.
In any case, I checked, there's very little chance of that happening with the CEO of Solid Power. Looks like a pretty solid linkedin profile for somebody running a company like this.
Sure but you're being a big disingenuous by just saying smart investors.
We have a number of car manufacturers involved here and they don't mess around when it comes to validating new technologies. Especially given how important batteries are to the future survival of the companies.
So it's not okay for him to make assumptions about the LinkedIn profile but it's okay for you to make baseless, presumptuous comparisons to Theranos? You can't have it both ways.
After Theranos and Magic Leap I've really downgraded the degree to which "huge investments from big incumbents" can be considered a reliable signal for quality.
Magic Leap didn't get investments from that many big incumbents. It's mostly just investment groups and Google being the only technology player.
And as I've said before. You can't make broad generalisations based on two data points. Huge investments from reputable companies are still a pretty good indicator of company success.
It looks like there are some serious investors involved that clearly believe that these guys know what they are doing. They presumably did their due diligence. That generally means this company used some seed funding to do proof of concepts and prototypes that are showing some promise.
In any case, 20M is nice but clearly nowhere near enough for mass producing stuff like this. So, what this means is this company just received funding to do more R&D from a nice consortium of investors that would clearly benefit from having a stake in a company like that if it had at all any chance of succeeding. Presumably there are still some hard problems left to work on otherwise, we'd be reading about some company investing billions to actually build the factories to mass produce this.
Since there are now several companies working on solid state batteries, the chances seem pretty good that one of them will eventually come up with viable products that can be produced at a quality, scale and cost that is interesting.
IMHO that will likely happen second half of the next decade or so. One application where this stuff might be applied early might be electric planes. That's a use case where improved energy density and safety is so valuable that even a very expensive solid state battery might still be interesting.