In the lithium-ion battery world, the race to the bottom isn’t as ominous as it sounds.
Battery manufacturers are under pressure from automakers to lower prices while maintaining or improving performance. They’ve largely delivered, with battery pack costs dropping from $780 to $139 per kilowatt-hour over the last decade, according to BNEF. That’s allowed electric vehicles to rapidly gain market share.
But recently, battery pack costs have begun to stagnate. If they don’t start dropping again, EVs might remain too expensive for the majority of consumers. One startup, Addionics, thinks a solution might be hidden in a part of the battery that’s often ignored: the foil current collector.
Today, current collectors resemble the aluminum foil you might have in your kitchen, and they serve to gather electrons from the active materials, the stuff that stores the ions that generate power. “It hasn’t changed dramatically in the last 30 years,” Moshiel Biton, co-founder and CEO of Addionics, told TechCrunch.
Biton’s company thinks the humble foil just needs a little texture. “The concept is not new,” he said, “but no one managed to commercialize it at scale.”
Previous attempts at modifying the collectors were either simplistic — punching them full of holes — or complex — growing spongy materials. The Israel- and U.K.-based startup has developed a way to create copper and aluminum foils that are laced with tiny holes and riddled with undulating peaks and valleys.
In the case of copper, the material used for the current collector on the anode, the negative terminal, Addionics uses electricity to deposit copper ions in the proper configuration. For aluminum, the material used to collect electrons from the cathode, the positive terminal, the startup is using electroetching. At a basic level, both techniques are similar to what’s used in the semiconductor industry.
Addionics’s wavy additions create a three-dimensional current collector that increases contact between the foil and active material. The result, the company claims, is a complex material that’s easy to manufacture and improves battery performance and efficiency while potentially doubling lifespan. It can also work with a wide range of battery chemistries, though Biton added that in the future it might tailor its collectors to different chemistries to squeeze out a bit more performance.
The startup recently raised a $39 million Series B led by GM Ventures and Deep Insight with participation from Scania, the Swedish commercial vehicle manufacturer. The company plans to use the funding to speed delivery of its current collectors and explore new markets and geographies “in order to reduce risk, to get more data points, to get more traction, and to make a faster route for commercialization,” Biton said.
Earlier this year, Addionics announced that it was planning to build a $400 million factory in the U.S. to produce its current collectors. The move would allow battery packs and EVs containing the materials to claim more incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act, which mandates increasing domestic content through the end of the decade.
Alongside the announcement of the factory, Addionics said it has letters of intent from U.S. automakers, though it didn’t say which ones those were. “We are going to announce it at a later stage with the factory announcement,” Biton said. “But in this round, you have the names of two OEMs that have invested in us. So it can give you some insight about customers that we are engaging with.”