“At the time that I left academia, the cost of solar was coming down so fast, but the cost of batteries was still a bottleneck to displacing fossil fuels with renewable energy,” said Phares, who earned his doctorate in environmental engineering science from the California Institute of Technology and bachelor’s in physics from Villanova University. “The mission of the company was to reduce the cost of manufacturing storage so that the combination of storage and renewable energy had a lower levelized cost than burning fossil fuels.” 

Dry electrode manufacturing

One who previously had experience in securing Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants for other types of ventures — including work related to solar cell manufacturing — it became time to advance the now patented aerosol-based dry deposition manufacturing processes for manufacturing electrode material (both anode and cathode) for lithium-ion batteries. 

“But there wasn't much interest in the investment community in batteries or manufacturing at all back then,” said Phares. “That