Why Addionics' $27M raise matters

For those of us who have been living and breathing the automotive industry for the past five years or so, the transition from internal combustion engine to hybrid and fully electric vehicles has felt imminent, with companies like Tesla leading the way. Like a storm displayed on our radar, we could see what lay ahead, but could not yet feel its magnitude in full. The all-encompassing effort levied on the automotive world in order to make this change take place — we understand now — is actually much larger than initially perceived. Today, mobility players better understand the enormity of the task. Now the storm is upon us, and we are feeling the claps of thunder exploding above our heads and shaking our core. Now it has become evident that vehicle manufacturers need to be intimately involved with issues like batteries materials, batteries manufacturing supply chain and life cycle, EV consumer adoption, EV charging infrastructure, and many other related concepts that are not necessarily traditionally in the car manufacturing space.

Moshiel Biton, the CEO of Addionics, stepped into my office in early 2018 with the idea to leverage research he had conducted with his academic advisors turned co-founders, Vlad Yufit and Farid Tariq at Imperial College in London, to create a better battery architecture. Until I met this trio, battery innovation seemed to me to be mostly about chemistry. It was a significant learning experience to absorb from the team how they look at and analyze structural changes and material deposition in different battery configurations. Within a few months, it became clear that the team possessed unique expertise and out-of-the-box ideas: unique structural changes to batteries could yield superior battery performance for a given chemistry.

The observant reader at this point might sit at the edge of their chair asking: what exactly did I see, back then in 2018? A special current collector? A unique manufacturing approach? What was their “shpitz” (the sharp tip of the arrow in Hebrew — a slang term for “core thing”)? The answer is — I wasn’t sure yet. I didn’t see a clear “shpitz.” What I saw was a collection of interesting — and compelling — gems.

Since then, we have spent days discussing current collectors’ battery chemistries and manufacturing methods, meeting with strategic partners and various experts and learning together. We realized that the automotive world is rapidly closing the gap on controlling its own destiny vis a vis battery development, supply, and know-how. It’s becoming increasingly clear that a deeper level of conceptual rigor is still missing and is required to understand battery behavior as a function of different chemistries and architectural configurations. This understanding opens up the chance for a revolution in the design framework, enabling batteries to become more cost effective, efficient and task-tailored.

It is very hard to sit with Moshiel and not like the guy. For sure this is one of the reasons he managed to bring in his academic advisors with him to the start-up and attract top-notch industry experts.

Deep technology and know-how, paired with fantastic talent and key strategic partners, seem to (not-so-slowly) be positioning Addionics as the next order of magnitude battery revolution, a position that is poised to stir up much excitement in the automotive industry. A progressively demanding automotive market really lends itself to breakthrough battery changes that later may be adopted by the rest of the battery storage market.

The promise is dramatic and the road is super exciting for Addionics.

To the Addionics team: Thank you for making your early believers proud. We trust you will keep doing it in the future.

Good luck!

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