Forbes Asia - June 2018

62 | FORBES ASIA JUNE 30, 2018

S

ila Nanotechnologies has all the trappings of a typical

Bay Area startup: an open loor plan, conference rooms

named for Atari games, healthy snacks in the kitchen.

Two Portuguese water dogs, Ångström and Lumen, rule

the boss’ oice.

Walk through the entrance and open the door, however,

and you won’t ind racks of servers or a foosball table. Instead,

you’ll see an industrial laboratory, complete with white-suited

workers in a clean room. Two-liter furnaces are hooked up to

gas lines, computers and chemistry instrumentation. Construc-

tion workers are tending a large, mysterious cylinder.

It’s all to perfect and then to commercialize a ine black

powder in a glass jar resting in the hand of Gene Berdichevsky,

34, the company’s cofounder and chief executive. What, exact-

ly, is this powder? hat is a secret, although we can tell you that

there is some silicon in it and that, if this substance does what

it’s supposed to do, it will deliver a 40% boost to the energy

performance of lithium-ion batteries.

“I think what Intel did for the semiconductor and person-

al computing industry in the ’90s is what we would want to en-

able in battery technologies,” Berdichevsky says grandly.

He has believers. Sila has raised more than $100 million

from Samsung Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, In-Q-

Tel and others. It is partnering with Hong Kong-based Amper-

ex Technology to get its powder into cellphones and wearables

like smartwatches as early as 2019. Sila also has a collaboration

with BMW for potential use in its cars in the early 2020s.

here’s a lot at stake. Batteries that can pack more juice into

a given space mean electric cars with a better range and cell-

phones that don’t have to be fed so oen. Within a decade, re-

search irm IDTechEx predicts, the market for just the car bat-

teries will be $125 billion a year.

Sila has plenty of rivals. here are several dozen companies

redesigning batteries or, like Sila, battery components, most of

them startups but some of them giants like Toyota and vacu-

um maker Dyson. It’s possible that the battery tournament will

ultimately be won by solid-state batteries, which eliminate the

liquid electrolyte typical of today’s batteries. For now, though,

that competitive threat is remote.

Sila has a less ambitious redesign of the lithium-ion battery

under way. Its powder would simply replace the graphite in ex-

isting battery technology. “Sila has a signiicant lead just be-

cause of the fact that they’re going to have a drop-in manu-

facturing process,” says Sam Jafe, managing director of Cairn

Energy Research Advisors.

Most lithium-ion batteries use an anode made largely from

graphite, a form of carbon that can be either mined or synthe-

sized. When the battery is being discharged, lithium ions de-

part the anode and move to the cathode, creating an electron

low to power your phone or car motor. When the battery is

being charged, the ions reverse course.

Sila’s powder beats graphite because silicon can hold signif-

icantly more lithium ions than graphite. Silicon is also cheap-

er than graphite. But there’s a catch. When silicon holds lithi-

um ions, it swells fourfold, like a bellows. he shi in volume

would drastically shorten the life span of the battery.

To avoid this problem, Sila builds a microscopic cage—

a nanocomposite that’s silicon-dominant—that holds silicon

with enough room for the expansion and contraction within.

his allows lithium ions to come in and out of the anode with-

out destroying the battery in the process.

he son of two electrical engineers turned computer pro-

grammers, Berdichevsky went to Stanford in 2001 as a me-

chanical-engineering major because, he says, “both of them

wanted me to do computer science, so that was the one thing I

wasn’t going to do.”

At Stanford he met Eerik Hantsoo (now vice president of

equipment engineering at Sila), and the two of them built a

two-person solar-powered car that raced from Chicago to Los

Angeles in a ten-day competition. he journey would have

taken a lot longer without the battery Berdichevsky helped de-

sign and build. In 2004 he dropped out of Stanford to become

Black Magic Powder

BY ALEX KNAPP

The alchemists at Sila Nano have their eyes on a $31 billion—and growing—

lithium-ion battery market. They just might get a nice piece of it.

Technology