Sila Nanotechnologies, a next-generation battery materials company, announced recently that it has secured an additional $45 million in investment from Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) rounding out the company’s total funding to $340 million. The investment will help the company to bring its first batteries to market.
The company is also expanding its leadership team. Former SunPower Executive Vice President of Global Operations Bill Mulligan joins the company as its first Chief Operating Officer, and longtime Panasonic and Tesla executive Kurt Kelty, who brings years of expertise in battery materials and manufacturing, joins as the Vice President of Automotive.
Sila Nano through new battery materials chemistry claims to enable lighter, safer, higher energy density batteries for mass adoption of electric vehicles, smarter, longer-lasting portable electronics, and broader use of renewable power sources. The company is pioneering novel manufacturing methods to create a drop-in silicon-based anode that entirely replaces graphite in a lithium-ion battery without requiring changes to the battery manufacturing process. It claims this leads to 20 percent improvement and has the potential to reach 40 percent improvement over state of the art traditional li-ion battery chemistry which has delivered incremental improvements for the past decade.
Earlier this year, Sila Nano secured $170 million in Series E funding led by Daimler AG. With $45 million in additional equity financing secured from CPPIB, the company aims to ramp up production volume and plans to supply its first commercial customers in consumer electronics within the next year. It plans to go to market with battery partner Amperex Technology Limited (ATL) and automotive partners BMW and Daimler.
Other investors in the company includes 8VC, Amperex Technology Limited, Bessemer Venture Partners, Chengwei Capital, CPPIB, Daimler, In-Q-Tel, Matrix Partners, Next47, Samsung, and Sutter Hill Ventures.
Source: Press Release
