Leading the charge in ultra-fast batteries

Since I've started as an academic I've always been interested in environmental issues. I worked in a chemical company and that's where I started to think about more practical sustainability issues. I started my own independent career and I continue those sorts of themes working on chlorofluorocarbon replacements, environmental chemistry, and at the end of that, batteries. For over 200 years batteries have been used by society and they've always taken many hours to charge. So if you want to charge batteries very quickly you would need to increase the input power capability of the battery and that's limited by the materials.

Today, ever since I came to Cambridge I was looking at energy storage technologies, and when I was a research student I didn't have all the answers. I moved into the industry looking at bringing new materials into the market and I was not able to find materials that could store enough energy and charge fast. In 2016 Claire found an answer to that problem through this discovery of new material that enabled ultra fast charge times and together we decided to set up the company to bring the new technology to the market.

Now Voltage is a company that is trying to solve a massive problem. We are a deep tech fund, so quite unusually we first and foremost look at the technology. Is that actually productizable? Is that innovative? Is that solving a massive problem that if you are successful the outcome could be great? Niobalt hopes to be a world leader in ultra fast charging batteries. We would be the first to launch them in the market within the next two years. The overall goal is to move to a world where charging is not part of your worries, changing the way that we think about charging, but it becomes so quick that we don't actually worry about it and don't have to factor it into our lives.

The dials are nice but it's kind of finding relevant value. We're demonstrating the 9V battery technology in an electric vehicle platform right now. It will take about a year or so to get it up such that our customers would be willing to translate that into their platforms and powertrains. So the first anxiety that we were told electric vehicle users have is the range anxiety. There is not enough infrastructure available to have those many charges available where you need it. The other problem is the batteries themselves cannot handle all that charge in short time scales. We're working on both the problems to get batteries to enable infrastructure to be rolled out in areas where the grid doesn't supply that power, and also get batteries into the vehicles that can accept that fast charge.

What we want to try and do is to ensure that everything we do is sustainable, from the processes we use, the fact that the batteries can last longer, the fact that we can recycle them, and the fact that we'll ensure that they have a second life. It was great to have a venture capital team right in town that understood our problem and the solution, and our team that we were building, to be able to bring this technology to the market in a very short time scale, which we were really after. A venture capitalist will bring many things to complement the scientists. We help bring team alongside them to help them commercialize. We also bring scaling expertise, we help them get funding across all the different levels, and we help them with various measures such as ESG.

The ambition is about achieving the 2050 goal of zero carbon and we have to do that by electrifying transport, increasing storage on the grid, and batteries are very much part of that story. The big one for me is the fact that what these companies do changes the world in a meaningful way, to solve some of the biggest problems we face as a society. It's something I think of all the time. It's about improving people's lives, at least in terms of the problems that we have.