The bitcoin market dipped again Tuesday while traders have scooped up ether options at the $1,120 price level.
Read more One of Ethereum’s most popular software wallets, MyEtherWallet, is giving users access to Ethereum 2.0 staking.
Read more Michael Saylor announced plans to offer convertible bonds with the express intent to buy BTC. The community reacts.
Read more Amy Yin doesn’t foresee startups resuming a five-day-a-week in-office work schedule, even after COVID-19 has been battled back. It’s probably a safe bet. Many companies have learned this year that employees can be just as productive, working from home. More, employees — much as they might miss their own desks — no longer want to sit in a traditional office all the time. According a survey of 2,300 tech employees conducted this past summer, just 7% of respondents said they wanted to head into work every day.
Yin experienced the shift to remote work firsthand as a senior engineer at Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange, which was early to send its employees home as the pandemic took hold in the U.S.
Working from home for the first time in her career — she’d previously been a software engineer with the recruitment platform Hired and, before that, a growth engineer at Facebook — she found herself working on her own schedule entirely and loving the flexibility.
By August, she says, she decided she could help Coinbase — and the growing number of other companies to adopt a remote-first organizational strategy — by starting up OfficeTogether, her now five-month-old, San Francisco-based, software-as-a-service company.
Its proposition is simple. With software that integrates with Slack, Google Calendar, and Okta (and soon to be Workday), OfficeTogether helps employees plan time in the office, see their teammates’ schedules, and also to take an automated health and symptom questionnaire that ensures that no one has a fever or has traveled in last 14 days.
The idea is largely to prevent employees from showing up to an office that is already at capacity, or stumbling into a sales team meeting when what’s really needed is quiet.
Impressively, the company already has paid annual contracts in the U.S., Europe and Canada, says Yin, who wasn’t comfortable discussing pricing in a call earlier today but who says that OfficeTogether isn’t competing on price with other competitors, like the workplace management software companies SpaceIQ and OfficeSpace.
Instead, she says, while rivals are more focused on work space utilization and using occupancy data to forecast capacity limits, OfficeTogether is focused around employees and, as a result, not wedded to a particular space so much as on ensuring that teams can come together when they want, whether that’s helping them organize a week at a co-working space or several days at a hotel.
“At some point,” she notes, “some companies might decide it’s cheaper to rent out hotel rooms than rent office space, which is expensive to manage.” She predicts that “flexible spaces for people to meet will be a big part of every company’s strategy. If you’re only meeting once a month for a week,” you can make do with less, she suggests.
Investors certainly seem to agree. A growing number of startups has been receiving funding that turn all kinds of locations into work spaces. Among them is Codi, a San Francisco-based startup that connects people with daytime workspaces in private homes and just today announced $7 million in funding.
In the meantime, OfficeTogether — which is run by Yin, a designer in San Francisco, and a handful of engineers in Romania — has just raised its own first institutional round: $2.2 million in seed funding. Defy led the round, joined by Neo, MGV and January Ventures, along with numerous angel investors who’ve met Yin through Coinbase; through her alma mater, Harvard; or through other connections.
Among those angels is former Sequoia partner Amy Sun, who is right now launching her own startup in Austin, Texas. Says Yin of Sun and some of the other individuals who’ve written her a check: “A lot of my friends are starting companies and it’s really fun to have people who are launching things” involved with one’s own startup. “We’re all invest in each other.”
As for where that new capital will be spent, Yin says it will go almost entirely to adding to the number of engineers on staff. As for possible marketing spend to spread the word about OfficeTogether, Yin says that her focus instead is on “enterprise B2B sales — running a sales process and ensuring the right people hear about it.”
Does she have a salesperson yet, we wonder? She laughs. For now, she says, “You’re talking to her.”
From a young age, Will Bruey, the co-founder and chief executive of Varda Space Industries, was fascinated with space and running his own business.
So when the former SpaceX engineer was tapped by Delian Asparouhov and Trae Stephens of Founders Fund to work on Varda he didn’t think twice.
Bruey spent six years at SpaceX. First working on the Falcon and Dragon video systems and then the bulk of the systems actuators and controllers used in the avionics for the crewed Dragon capsule (which recently docked at the International Space Station). `
According to Asparouhov, that background, and the time that Bruey spent running his own angel syndicate and working at Bank of America getting a grounding in finance and startups, made him an ideal candidate to run the next startup to be spun out of Founders Fund .
Like other Founders Fund companies, Palantir and Anduril, Varda takes its name from the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien. Named for the Elf queen who created constellations, the company has set itself no less lofty a task than bringing manufacturing to space.
News of the funding was first reported by Axios.
While companies like Space Tango and Made In Space already are attempting to make a viable business out of space manufacturing, they focus on small scale pilots and experimental projects. Varda separates itself by its loftier ambition — to manufacture commercially viable products at scale in space.
To be economically viable, these products have to be very very high value, and according to the IEEE there are already some goods that fit the bill. Things like carbon nanotubes and fiber optic cables, organs, and novel materials are all potential targets for a space manufacturing company, because they can conceivably justify the high cost of material transportation.
Image Credit: Getty Images/AbelCreativeStudio
“Manufacturing is the next step for commercialization in space,” said Bruey. “The primary driver that makes us economical is success in the launch business.”
With now-established companies like SpaceX, Rocket Lab and Blue Origin, and upstarts like Relativity Space, Spinlaunch, and the newly launched Aevum Space all driving down the cost of launching objects into space, the next wave of commercialization is coming.
Varda’s backers, which put $9 million into the company, were led by Founders Fund and Lux Capital . Additional participation came from Fifty Years, Also Capital, Raymond Tonsing, Justin Mateen, and Naval Ravikant.
These investors are all placing a bet that the biggest returns could be in manufacturing. As a result of their investments, Founders Fund partner Trae Stephens and Lux Capital co-founder Josh Wolfe are both taking seats on the company’s board.
“The first things we will manufacture are things with high dollar per-unit-mass value,” said Bruey. “As we establish our manufacturing platform that will ramp into the longer term vision of offloading manufacturing for all space operations.”
There are two categories of space manufacturing in the industry to come, according to Bruey and Asparouhov and those are additive manufacturing for making products to be used in space, and manufacturing in space for terrestrial applications. It’s the second of these that Varda focuses on. “Nothing we will be doing will be 3D printing,” said Asparouhov. “We will be focused on making things in space that we can bring back to earth.
The company may not be working on 3D printing, but its manufacturing facilities won’t look like anything on Earth. Initially, they’ll be unmanned, according to a blog post published by Fifty Years. Then they’ll manufacture things in space that benefit from low gravity. Finally, the company intends to build the first inrastructure that can harvest source materials for new products in-space via asteroid mining.
“Varda can make manufacturing sustainable by eliminating the need to destructively extract earth’s resources, help cure chronic diseases, deepen our understanding of biology, help connect more people to the Internet, and usher in higher-throughput and lower energy methods of computation,” Fifty Years co-founder Seth Bannon wrote in a direct message. “Bringing human industry into the stars — this is entrepreneurship at its boldest! Varda is the sort of big swing ambition venture capital was invented for.”
The Federal Trade Commission has sued to block Procter & Gamble’s acquisition of Billie, a NY-based startup that sells razors and body wash.
In the notice, the FTC alleged that the merger would “eliminate innovative nascent competitors for wet shave razors” to the loss of consumers.
Billie was founded in 2017 with the goal of fighting the “pink tax” on goods marketed to women, including razors and body wash. It went up against companies like P&G and Edgewell Personal Care by offering high-quality and cheap razors. The company announced its intent to be acquired by P&G after raising just $35 million in venture capital in June.
“As its sales grew, Billie was likely to expand into brick-and-mortar stores, posing a serious threat to P&G. If P&G can snuff out Billie’s rapid competitive growth, consumers will likely face higher prices,” Ian Conner, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition said in a statement.
P&G has been on a buying spree as of late. Along with the Billie news, Procter & Gamble acquired Walker & Company, which created Bevel, a grooming line for men of color, and Form, a hair-care line for women of color. In February 2019, P&G announced plans to acquire This is L, a feminine-care brand that sells tampons, pads and wipes.
If the FTC wins, this is another blow for direct-to-consumer brands on the base of competition dynamics. In May 2019, Edgewell Personal Care announced it intended to buy Harry’s, another direct-to-consumer shaving brand. In February 2020, the FTC filed a lawsuit to block the deal from happening, similarly citing how the deal would limit competition and innovation in the razor market.
Unlike Harry’s, Billie was bought before it broke into brick-and-mortar retail stores. If the deal doesn’t close, Billie lost precious time it could have used to expand into new locations and markets — and P&G will lose some of its competitive advantage in the women’s shaving world.
Harry’s and Billie’s blocks could negatively trickle down to hurt direct-to-consumer products looking at health and wellness more broadly.
Note that exit market isn’t as dull for all companies in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) world. We’ve seen deals close like Blue Bunny’s buy of Halo Top, Mars’ acquisition of Kind Bars and, of course, Unilever’s $1 billion acquisition of Dollar Shave Club.
Andrea Hernández, a founder and consultant on food and beverage CPG, says that DTC companies often need to partner with mega-businesses to get the distribution scale they need, focusing more on omni-channel presence versus a single seller point.
“It’s very limited for these companies to scale at the same level and grow without incurring debt or needing constant injections of [money],” she said. “Or [you can go] the preferred route which is having BigDaddyCorp come whisk you away. You get a success story and the resources to continue your journey.”
That said, the coronavirus has even impacted food CPG companies by forcing them to slash SKUs (or stock keeping units) and prioritize essential goods. Whereas before, CPG companies might stock a variety of goods for a variety of customer needs, they’re now prioritizing a smaller slice of the pie to manage uncertainty among consumer behavior. Long-term, this means that CPGs might be buying fewer of the Billies and Harry’s of the world and just focusing on what’s working now.
Selene Cruz, the founder of Restore which gives DTC brands an offline presence, said that she’s a”bit surprised to see the FTC claiming the acquisition kills competition. Billie going into brick & mortar doesn’t mean instant success enough to take on a major conglomerate.”
“If the FTC’s goal is to not kill competition then I’d advise them not to diminish exit prospects for investors and founders,” Cruz added. “This would hurt investment in the space and that’s the real fear for innovators.”
Additionally, Clearbanc founder Michele Romanow said that “while this isn’t at all ideal for Billie, it means other growing D2C brands have a better chance to build a strong brand and gives consumers more options.”
Regardless of how this plays out, today’s news shows that the FTC is paying more attention than ever to consumer and tech.
We already knew that Halo Infinite was delayed until next year. Initially intended to launch alongside the new Xboxes, Microsoft announced back in August that it would instead ship in 2021.
Exactly when in 2021, though, was still anyone’s guess. A new blog post from 343 Industries narrows it down a bit: it’ll be released in Fall.
Assuming they mean Fall in the Northern Hemisphere (which, well, they probably do,) this narrows the launch window to sometime between the end of September and the end of December. So it’ll be a while… but a late game is better than a bad game, right?
343 has a blog post and interview outlining the team’s thinking on the timing (and a bit about what they’re still working on) but it really all boils down to one point: they “needed more time to do things right.”
A year ago this week Ada Ventures — a U.K./Europe-focused VC with an “impact twist” aiming to invest in diverse founders tackling societal problems — launched onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt. (You can watch the video of that launch below.)
Today Ada announces that it has closed its first fund at $50 million. Cornerstone LPs in the fund include Big Society Capital, an entity owned by the U.K. government, as well as the British Business Bank.
Check Warner, a co-founding partner, said the raise was oversubscribed: “We weren’t even sure we’d be able to raise $30 million. And then to actually get to £38 million then $50 million, which was over our initial hard cap of 35 is, is really, really big.” All of the fund was raised on video calls during the 2020 pandemic.
Geared as a “first-cheque” seed fund, Ada is trying to tackle that thorny problem that to a large extent the VC industry itself created: the “mirroring” that goes on when white male investors invest in other white men, thus ignoring huge swathes of society. Instead, it’s aiming to invest in the best talent in the U.K. and Europe, regardless of race, gender or background, with the specific aim of “creating the most diverse pipeline, and portfolio, on the continent”, while tackling issues including mental health, obesity, workers rights and affordable childcare.
It appears to be well on its way. In 2020, Ada invested in eight seed-stage companies tackling the above issues. Four of the eight companies have female CEOs. This brings the total portfolio size to 17, including the “pre-fund” portfolio.
In terms of portfolio progress: Huboo Technologies raised a £14 million Series A, which was led by Stride VC and Hearst Ventures; Bubble delivered tens of thousands of hours of free childcare to NHS staff; and Organise grew their members from 70,000 to more than 900,000, and campaigned for the government to provide support for the self-employed during COVID-19.
On Ada Lovelace Day this October, Ada launched its own Angel program, enabling five new Angel investors to write their first cheques. This is not dissimilar to similar Angel programs run by other VCs. It also has a network of 58 “Ada Scouts” resulting in around 20% of deal flow, with two investments now made across the portfolio that were scout-sourced.
This is no ordinary scout network, however. Ada’s Scout community includes the leaders of Hustle Crew, a for-profit working to make the tech industry more inclusive, and Muslamic Makers, a community of Muslims in tech.
In 2021, Ada says it will continue to grow its network of Ada Scouts across the U.K., with a focus on the LGBTQ+ community, disabled entrepreneurs and regions outside of London.
And the Scout network is not just “for show”, as Warner told me: “We have spoken to the Iranian Women’s Association and Islamic makers and all these groups that are underrepresented within tech and VC. And they bring us companies. And if we end up investing in these companies, we pay them both an upfront cash fee and also a carried interest share. So there are quite a few things that make it distinct from other scout programs. Many other scout programs just take existing investors like existing angels, and give them more capital and double up their investments. We’re actually enabling a whole new group of people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to get access to VC. We involve them in our due diligence process, we get their insight into markets that we wouldn’t necessarily understand, like the Shariya finance market, for example. So there are quite a few things that we’re doing differently. And we now have 58 of these scouts, who drive between 10 and 20% of our deal flow on any given month.”
Warner continued: “When we launched we couldn’t have predicted the seismic changes and tragedy brought on by COVID-19, or the social dislocation precipitated by the killing of George Floyd. These events have provided the backdrop of the first year of deployment from Ada Ventures Fund I. In light of these events, the Ada Ventures strategy feels more poignant — and urgent — than it has perhaps ever been.”
In an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, Warner and co-founder Matt Penneycard admitted the fund is not labeled as an “Impact fund” but that it shares a similar orientation.
Penneycard said: “The difference, the difference is often in the eye of the beholder. In that, it’s the way the investor wants to bucket it. Some investors might see us as an impact fund if they want to, and that’s fine. Other investors see the massive financial arbitrage that you get with a fund like ours, just because you’re looking in very different places to other funds. So, you’ve got more coming in the top of the funnel, if you’ve got a decent process, you should get a better outcome. And so with some of our investors, that’s kind of one of the primary reasons they’re investing, they think we’re going to generate superior returns to other funds, because of where were are looking. It isn’t pure impact. It’s a real fund, it just happens to have the byproduct of quite deep, meaningful social impact.”
As a reporter who can code, I can easily collect information from websites and social media accounts to find stories. All I need to do is write a few lines of code that go into the ether, open up websites, and download the data that is already publicly available on them. This process is called scraping.
But there’s a calculus I make in my head whenever I begin pursuing a story that requires scraping: “Is this story worth going to prison for?”
I’m not talking about hacking into the walled-off databases of the CIA. I’m talking about using a script to gather information that I can access as an everyday Internet consumer, like public Instagram posts or tweets that use a certain hashtag.
My worry is not unfounded. A vaguely written US law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act makes accessing this kind of information in programmatic ways a potential crime. The decades-old law was introduced after lawmakers saw the 1983 movie WarGames and decided the US needed an anti-hacking law that forbids anyone from using a computer “without authorization or exceeding authorized access.”
While the law may have been well-intentioned and has been used to prosecute people who download things from their work systems that they’re not supposed to, it also catches a lot of other people in its widely cast net, including academics, researchers, and journalists.
What does “exceeding authorized access” mean in an age of social media? Does an employee who has access to a database of research journals for work and uses them for private purposes exceed authorized access? Does a reporter like me who gathers information using automated processes and her own Facebook account commit a crime?
Until now, interpretations of the law have ping-ponged from court case to court case, relying on various judges to give us a better definition of what exactly it means to exceed one’s authorized access to information. But soon the US Supreme Court will rule on the law for the first time, in the case Van Buren v. United States. Nathan Van Buren, a police officer, had access to confidential databases for work and sold information he looked up there to a third party. The court heard opening arguments on November 30 and could announce its decision any day.
We think that the Van Buren v. United States case before the Supreme Court today is a threat to data journalism. So much so that we filed an amicus brief. This is why:
— The Markup (@themarkup) November 30, 2020
From unfair pricing on Amazon to hate speech on Facebook, many corporate misdeeds can be traced through the platforms on which we conduct large parts of our lives. And the vast digital footprint that human beings produce online, much of which is publicly available, can help us patch data holes and investigate areas that might be otherwise hard to understand.
As the artist and technology expert Mimi Onuoha pointed out in her poignant piece The Library of Missing Datasets:
That which we ignore reveals more than what we give our attention to. It’s in these things that we find cultural and colloquial hints of what is deemed important. Spots that we've left blank reveal our hidden social biases and indifferences.
Data collection is expensive and cumbersome, but it’s also an important tool for discovering and revealing systemic injustices. What data we deem important enough to collect is a matter often left to powerful entities—governments and corporations—that don’t always keep society’s most vulnerable people in mind.
If Chinese government officials won’t publish information on the camps where Muslim minorities are being detained, then perhaps researchers can use information from Google maps to approximate the scope of this issue. If perpetrators won’t admit to war crimes but post about them on social media, prosecutors and human rights researchers can still build cases against them.
Should companies like Facebook have the legal recourse to shut down academic research? Should there be an exemption when web scraping is the only way to gather data that helps researchers, academics, and journalists diagnose the ills of our society?
Twitter may have modeled a way forward. Reckoning with its role in the spread of misinformation around the 2016 US election, the company decided to create special access to data specifically for academics and researchers. While the company still frowns upon scraping, this step signals that it recognizes how important the data is.
Perhaps lawmakers can, too.
Lam Thuy Vo is a senior reporter at BuzzFeed News, where she has reported stories on misinformation, hatred online, and platform-related accountability. Her book Mining Social Media was published by No Starch Press in late 2019.
Scientists have long seen lithium-metal batteries as an ideal technology for energy storage, leveraging the lightest metal on the periodic table to deliver cells jam-packed with energy.
But researchers and companies have tried and failed for decades to produce affordable, rechargeable versions that didn’t have a nasty habit of catching on fire.
Then earlier this year Jagdeep Singh, the chief executive of QuantumScape, claimed in an interview with The Mobilist that the heavily funded, stealth Silicon Valley company had cracked the key technical challenges. He added that VW expects to have the batteries in its cars and trucks by 2025, promising to slash the cost and boost the range of its electric vehicles.
After going public in November, QuantumScape is now valued at around $20 billion, despite having no product or revenue as yet (and no expectation that it will until 2024). VW has invested more than $300 million in the company and has created a joint venture with QuantumScape to manufacture the batteries. The company has also raised hundreds of millions from other major investors.
Still, until now Singh had revealed few details about the battery, prompting researchers, rivals and journalists to scour patent filings, investor documents and other sources for clues as to what precisely the company had achieved—and how.
In a press announcement on Tuesday, December 8, QuantumScape finally provided technical results from lab tests. Its technology is a partially solid-state battery, meaning that it uses a solid electrolyte instead of the liquid that most batteries rely on to promote the movement of charged atoms through the device.
Numerous researchers and companies are exploring solid-state technology for a variety of battery chemistries because this approach has the potential to improve safety and energy density, though developing a practical version has proved difficult.
The company, based in San Jose, California, is still withholding certain details about its battery, including some of the key materials and processes it’s using to make it work. And some experts remain skeptical that QuantumScape has truly addressed the tricky technical challenges that would make a lithium-metal battery possible in commercial vehicles in the next five years.
Test results
In an interview with MIT Technology Review, Singh says the company has shown that its batteries will effectively deliver on five key consumer needs that have thus far prevented electric vehicles from surpassing 2% of new US auto sales: lower costs, greater range, shorter charging times, longer total lifetime on the road, and improved safety.
“Any battery that can meet these requirements can really open up the 98% of the market in a way you can’t do today,” he says.
COURTESY: QUANTUMSCAPE
Indeed, QuantumScape’s performance results are notable.
The batteries can charge to 80% capacity in less than 15 minutes. (MotorTrend found that Tesla’s V3 Supercharger took a Model 3 from 5% to 90% in 37 minutes, in a test last year.) And they retain more than 80% of their capacity over 800 charging cycles, which is the rough equivalent of driving 240,000 miles. In fact, the battery shows little degradation even when subjected to aggressive charge and discharge cycles.
Finally, the company says that the battery is designed to achieve driving ranges that could exceed those of electric vehicles with standard lithium-ion batteries by more than 80%—though this hasn’t been directly tested yet.
“The data from QuantumScape is quite impressive,” says Paul Albertus, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Maryland and previously the program director of ARPA-E’s solid-state-focused IONICS program, who has no affiliation or financial relationship with the company.
The company has “gone much further than other things I’ve seen” in lithium-metal batteries, he adds: “They’ve run a marathon while everyone else has done a 5K.”
How it works
So how’d they achieve all this?
In a standard lithium-ion battery in an electric car today, one of the two electrodes (the anode) is mostly made from graphite, which easily stores the lithium ions that shuttle back and forth through the battery. In a lithium-metal battery, that anode is made from lithium itself. That means that nearly every electron can be put to work storing energy, which is what accounts for the greater energy density potential.
But it creates a couple of big challenges. The first is that the metal is highly reactive, so if it comes into contact with a liquid, including the electrolyte that supports the movement of those ions in most batteries, it can trigger side reactions that degrade the battery or cause it to combust. The second is that the flow of lithium ions can form needle-like formations known as dendrites, which can puncture the separator in the middle of the battery, short-circuiting the cell.
Over the years, those issues have led researchers to try to develop solid-state electrolytes that aren’t reactive with lithium metal, using ceramics, polymers, and other materials.
One of QuantumScape’s key innovations was developing a solid-state ceramic electrolyte that also serves as the separator. Just a few tens of micrometers thick, it suppresses the formation of dendrites while still allowing lithium ions to pass easily back and forth. (The electrolyte on the other end of the battery, the cathode side, is a gel of some form, so it’s not a fully solid-state battery.)
Singh declines to specify the material they’re using, saying it’s one of their most closely guarded trade secrets. (Some battery experts suspect, on the basis of patent filings, that it’s an oxide known as LLZO.) Finding it took five years; developing the right composition and manufacturing process to prevent defects and dendrites took another five.
The company believes that the move to solid-state technology will make the batteries safer than the lithium-ion variety on the market today, which still occasionally catch on fire themselves under extreme circumstances.
The other big advance is that the battery is manufactured without a distinct anode. (See QuantumScape’s video here to get a better sense of its “anode free” design.)
As the battery charges, the lithium ions in the cathode side travel through the separator and form a perfectly flat layer between it and the electrical contact on the end of the battery. Nearly all of that lithium then returns to the cathode during the discharge cycle. This eliminates the need for any “host” anode material that’s not directly contributing to the job of storing energy or carrying current, further reducing the necessary weight and volume. It also should cut manufacturing costs, the company says.
Remaining risks
There is a catch, however: QuantumScape’s results are from lab tests performed on single-layer cells. An actual automotive battery would need to have dozens of layers all working together. Getting from the pilot line to commercial manufacturing is a significant challenge in energy storage, and the point at which plenty of once promising battery startups have failed.
Albertus notes that there’s a rich history of premature claims of battery breakthroughs, so any new ones are met with skepticism. He’d like to see QuantumScape submit the company’s cells to the sorts of independent testing that national labs perform, under standardized conditions.
Other industry observers have expressed doubts that the company could achieve the scale-up and safety tests required to put batteries into vehicles on the road by 2025, if the company has only rigorously tested single-layer cells so far.
Sila Nanotechnologies, a rival battery startup developing a different sort of energy dense anode materials for lithium-ion batteries, released a white paper a day before the Mobilist story that highlights a litany of technical challenges for solid-state lithium-metal batteries. It notes that many of the theoretical advantages of lithium-metal narrow as companies work toward commercial batteries, given all the additional measures required to make them work.
But the paper stresses that the hardest part will be meeting the market challenge: competing with the massive global infrastructure already in place to source, produce, ship, and install lithium-ion batteries.
Massive bets
Other observers, however, say that the recent advances in the field indicate both that lithium-metal batteries will significantly surpass the energy density of lithium-ion technology and that the problems holding up the field can be resolved.
“It used to be whether we’ll have lithium-metal batteries; now it’s a question of when we’ll have them,” says Venkat Viswanathan, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon who has researched lithium-metal batteries (and has done consulting work for QuantumScape).
Singh acknowledged that the company still face challenges, but he insists they relate to engineering and scaling up manufacturing. He doesn’t think any additional breakthroughs in the chemistry are required.
He also noted the company now has more $1 billion, providing it considerable runway to get to commercial production.
Asked why journalists should have confidence in the company’s results without the benefit of independent findings, Singh stressed that he’s sharing as much of the data as he can to be transparent. But he adds that QuantumScape isn’t “in the business of academic research.”
“No offense, but we don’t really care what you think,” he says. “The people we care about are our customers. They’ve seen the data, they’ve run the tests in their own lab, they’ve seen it works, and as a result they’re putting in massive bets on this company. VW has gone all in.”
In other words, the real test of whether QuantumScape has solved the problems as fully as it claims is whether the German auto giant puts cars equipped with the batteries on the road by 2025.