WALTHAM, Mass.- A new battery for electric vehicles that charges in three minutes and lasts for 20 years could soon be coming to new cars.
Adden Energy received an exclusive license from Harvard University $5.15 million in venture funding will enable the startup to scale Harvard’s laboratory prototype toward commercial deployment of a solid-state lithium-metal battery that may provide reliable and fast charging for future EVs to help bring them into the mass market.
Developed by researchers in the lab of Xin Li, PhD, Associate Professor of Materials Science at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), the lab-scale coin-cell prototype has achieved battery charge rates as fast as three minutes with over 10,000 cycles in a lifetime, with results published in Nature and other journals. It also boasts high energy density and a level of material stability that overcomes the safety challenges posed by some other lithium batteries.
Adden Energy was co-founded in 2021 by Li, along with William Fitzhugh, PhD, and Luhan Ye, PhD, both of whom contributed to the development of the technology as graduate students in Li’s Harvard lab. Fred Hu, PhD, founder and Chairman of Primavera Capital, is also a founder of Adden Energy.
The startup aims to scale the battery up to a palm-sized pouch cell, and then upward toward a full-scale vehicle battery in the next three to five years.
“If you want to electrify vehicles, a solid-state battery is the way to go,” said Li, who is a scientific advisor to Adden Energy. “We set out to commercialize this technology because we do see our technology as unique compared to other solid-state batteries. We have achieved in the lab 5,000 to 10,000 charge cycles in a battery’s lifetime, compared with 2,000 to 3,000 charging cycles for even the best in class now, and we don’t see any fundamental limit to scaling up our battery technology. That could be a game changer.”
