ARPA-E Disruptors: Sila Nanotechnologies (2024)

Table of Contents

Innovation Sila's silicon anode is 5x lighter and 2x smaller than current-day lithium-ion battery anodes. Impact Funding ARPA-E Partnership If it works, will it matter?

Sila's silicon anode powder.

Innovation

Sila’s silicon anode material is catalyzing faster charging and longer-range electric vehicles (EV) and is disrupting a technology space that has barely budged in decades.

Sila’s breakthrough silicon powder boosts the energy capacity of lithium-ion batteries by 20% and can directly replace graphite in current-day batteries.

Sila's silicon anode is 5x lighter and 2x smaller than current-day lithium-ion battery anodes.

Impact

Sila has secured contracts with Mercedes-Benz and Panasonic to incorporate its technology to increase EV adoption.

Sila purchased its first stand-alone manufacturing facility in 2022 and will use support from President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to accelerate the build-out. The 600,000-square-foot factory in Moses Lake, Washington, will create hundreds of jobs.

The Moses Lake facility will produce enough anode capacity to power 1 million cars in the next 5 years.

Funding

Sila has raised more than $1.3 billion in funding from Coatue, T. Rowe Price, Sutter Hill Ventures, and other investors. The Department of Energy gave the company $100 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to accelerate the scale up of manufacturing. Sila’s projects have received $17.8 million from ARPA-E across four programs.

ARPA-E Partnership

Gene Berdichevsky, Tesla Motor’s seventh engineer, knew that Georgia Institute of Technology professor Gleb Yushin’s nano-composite silicon would revolutionize EV battery power. With Tesla battery engineer Alex Jacobs, the trio launched Sila.

One year later, ARPA-E supported Sila’s early technological development under its BEEST program. With ARPA‑E support, Sila fine-tuned the microstructure and other properties of the silicon powder over 10,000 iterations. In subsequent years, ARPA-E funded other exploratory projects by Sila and its efforts to commercialize the silicon anode.

“I spent my whole prior life in academia,” said Sila’s Chief Technology Officer Gleb Yushin. “The commercial guidance, introductions, connections, and support that ARPA-E provided have been quite valuable for me.”