Amid a challenging environment for battery startups, Sila has raised $375 million to complete construction of a U.S. factory by the end of 2025 that will scale next-generation battery technology for customers such as Mercedes-Benz and Panasonic.
Sila, formerly known as Sila Nanotechnologies, expects to complete construction of its Moses Lake, Washington, plant in the first quarter of next year, where it will begin mass producing its brand of Titan Silicon anode materials.
The pure-play Series G round, led by existing investor Sutter Hill Ventures and joined by Bessemer Venture Partners, Coatue, and Perry Creek Capital, comes as other electric vehicle battery companies struggle to get products to market and stay afloat.
Earlier this year, Ionic Materials shut down, Umicore slashed its guidance on expected EV sales weakness, and startup Freyr Battery, which went public in 2021 after merging with a special purpose acquisition company, has also failed to ramp up production of its next-generation batteries.
“It’s obviously a very difficult market for late-stage growth, high capital expenditures, anything with EVs,” Sila founder and CEO Gene Berdichevsky told TechCrunch. “But we have great technology, we're scaling up, we've got the plant running smoothly, and we've got cars on the road. That's really a milestone that everyone around the world wants to see.”
Sila's ability to raise such a large investment in a challenging environment can be seen as a vote of confidence in the company's approach to battery chemistry and its ability to scale production. Berdichevsky, who was Tesla's seventh employee before founding Sila in 2011, previously told TechCrunch that getting the science right isn't enough if you can't do it in a fundamentally scalable way.
This is especially true in a world where hundreds of thousands of EVs are expected to hit the market in the next few years and where automakers are increasingly looking for ways to end their dependence on China for critical battery materials.
Sila's answer was to replace the graphite in lithium-ion battery anodes with silicon, a material that can be produced anywhere rather than mined and processed in specific regions. Using silicon allows for a more local supply chain for critical battery materials, Berdichevksey says, and allows for denser, cheaper battery cells that can help speed up EV charging. And by replacing just one component of the battery, cell manufacturers don't have to make drastic changes to their production processes.
The anode is a key battery component that stores lithium when charging the battery. The corresponding cathode stores lithium when the battery discharges. Lithium goes back and forth between charge and discharge through the electrolyte, and a separator prevents the lithium from short-circuiting.
Berdichevsky says that by replacing graphite with silicon, Sila's products today have a 20% to 25% increase in energy density.
“And in the future, we expect to see energy density increases of up to 40 percent without changing anything else in the battery,” he said.
Sila said in a statement that future releases of Titan Silicon will shorten charging times to less than 10 minutes and lower battery costs.
Sila has been providing Titan Silicon to automotive customers for several years from its headquarters in Alameda, California, but only long enough to put the technology into vehicle testing. And Sila's technology is already featured in the base model of the Mercedes electric G-Wagon, which was recently launched in Beijing.
The Moses Lake facility allows for the scale and manufacturing standards for series production of the car, Berdichevsky says. From there, automakers must perform final validation qualifications before applying Sila's battery technology to production vehicles at scale.
In addition to Mercedes, Sila has publicly announced plans to provide battery technology to various automakers, most notably Panasonic, which manufactures EV batteries for Tesla. Sila, which debuted commercially with the Whoop wearable in 2021, plans to announce other automotive and consumer electronics customers in the future.
Berdichevsky says the Moses Lake facility is large enough to expand Titan Silicon's capacity to more than a million vehicles through future expansion.
