Spencer Gore and Rafael Vilá co-founded a new startup developing low-cost sodium-ion batteries.

 

Spencer Gore and Rafael Vilá co-founded a new startup developing low-cost sodium-ion batteries.  The startup's name was not disclosed as it is currently working under stealth mode. The duo raised an undisclosed sum from a seed round led by angel investors.  Gore's career includes stints at Enovix as head of electric vehicle products and at Tesla as a battery engineer.  Additionally, he founded the electric drone startup Impossible Aerospace in 2016.  The new startup is the first outside of China to develop silicon-ion batteries.  Battery manufacturers and automakers are not keen on developing silicon-ion batteries as they are, in theory, unlikely to match the extended driving range expected from newer technologies such as ultrahigh-energy density batteries with silicon anodes or solid-state batteries with pure lithium anodes.  Silicon-ion batteries weigh three times more and produce a third of the kilowatt-hour capacity than iron-based batteries.  However, silicon-ion batteries are much cheaper to manufacture, thanks to the abundance of sodium, which accounts for 2.3% of the world's crust, making its reserves 1,000 times larger than global lithium reserves.