JUNE 2018 FORBES ASIA | 63TIMOTHY ARCHIBALD FOR FORBES
Scaling up: Cofounders Gene
Berdichevsky (left), Gleb Yushin
(center) and Alex Jacobs with part
of the production line that will
make enough of their innovative
battery material to power 20 million
smartwatches.BATTERIESthe seventh employee at Tesla.
It was while testing a variety of lithium-ion batteries for the
Tesla Roadster that he noticed performance improvements in
batteries were slowing down. he battery business needed a
breakthrough.
Berdichevsky went back to Stanford and got a master’s in
engineering in 2010, focusing on materials science. Later, as
entrepreneur-in-residence at Sutter Hill Ventures, he began
to think about how to build not just a better battery but also a
better battery company. he eicient solution might be to make
a component instead of the whole thing.At Sutter Hill, Berdi-
chevsky investigated many
technologies, but the one that
caught his eye came from Gleb
Yushin, a Russian émigré run-
ning a nanotechnology lab at
Georgia Tech. Along with Alex
Jacobs, they founded Sila Nan-
otechnologies in Atlanta under
the university’s aegis. Sila spent
the next few years develop-
ing recipes for making an-
odes, testing 30,000 variations
in areas like temperature and
inputs. It moved to Alameda,
California, in 2014.
Now it’s time to produce.
Sila is in the midst of building
several reactors for a new prod-
uct line that it hopes will cook
up enough powder annu ally for
6 million amp-hours’ worth of
batteries. hat would be enough
black magic for 2.3 million
phone batteries. If Sila can de-
liver on its 40% performance promise, those batteries will pack
14 watt-hours of energy into a space that now contains 10. But,
Berdichevsky concedes, “there’s just a huge amount of engineer-
ing and execution work that has to happen.”
he immediate market will be for batteries that go into
wearables and phones. Sila intends to use the knowledge and
revenues gained there to get into the much juicier business of
car batteries. “he drop-in nature means we don’t have to build
a billion-dollar Gigafactory,” Berdichevsky says, referring to
ambitious expansions by Tesla and some Chinese outits. “We
can work with the people who are going to do that anyway.” F