By Kyle Proffitt
April 28, 2026 | Day two of the Venture, Innovation & Partnering summit at the International Battery Seminar & Exhibit continued with deeper discussion of how best to navigate the shifting battery landscape. Panel discussions were held focusing on raising capital, new battery markets, Western innovation, and more. What follows are some salient parts of these broader discussions.
Funding Cycles and Sound Advice
James Frith, Principal at Volta Energy Technologies, opened a morning panel on raising capital, filled by early- through late-stage investors and one startup CEO. The private capital market for battery tech is in a downturn, he said, but we’ve seen this film before, and it gets better. Frith recounted: Clean Tech 1.0, 2006-2013; about five years of downtime; Climate 2.0, peaking 2020-2022; and then cooling into the present.
“Have we reached the bottom of the cycle?” Frith asked, and all four panelists agreed we have. Jeff Johnson, partner at B Capital Group referenced his Climate 3.0 paper (which he wishes he’d called Energy 3.0) and explained that “we’re at a moment in time where people are valuing deep tech and hard tech.” Additionally, “you’re seeing a lot of push from the US government in particular in areas that can be quite positive,” he said.
Scott Walbrun, Principal at BMW i Ventures, said that in 2020-2021, a lot of “tourist capital” came into the space. Investors unfamiliar with physical infrastructure applied software-company expectations to companies building factories, and they got burned. However, there was a “culling of the herd,” and now “there are companies that have sprouted up all across the value chain and are scaling,” he said. After a reset, he says companies are doing a better job of thinking through the revenue stream, delaying or limiting the acceptance of venture capital, and planning for eventual customers and their needs.
Plan for Commercialization
According to Johnson, founders are often technology-focused, but real difficulty shows up on the commercial side. He said it’s common to hear from founders at Series B, saying now they need to raise money for commercial endeavors. “No!” he says, “you should have been doing that in your seed round.”
Sidd Bhat of IFM investors echoed this on the infrastructure-capital side. He wants to see a credible revenue construct and a clear picture of who the end customers will be before investing. However, with the reset, “we think it’s the right time to be deploying significant check sizes,” he said. “The market has become more disciplined. The overall message that even early-stage VC investors are giving their portfolio companies is to start thinking about commercialization, which probably didn’t exist four or five years ago.”
Amanda Hall, CEO of Summit Nanotech, which develops direct lithium extraction technology, provided the only founder perspective, including some caution about best-laid plans. In 2023, they had just raised a Series A2 $50 million, and everything was going well. Then lithium prices crashed. Investors froze, and she had to lay off fifty people. “Two years of hell, essentially,” she said, but it made them lean, with a renewed focus on customers. On the tail end, Summit landed the largest lithium mining company in the world as a pilot partner.
Headed toward commercialization, Hall gave some advice about strategic investors. She mentioned their connections to LG, Mitsui, and BHP, but said they were coached not to become overly hitched. “Their money is nice to have, but it’s more about the credibility of them being on the cap table, the ability to work with them in the future once you become commercial,” she said.
International Competition
Can we compete with China in the clean tech space? Bhat: “definitely,” but “pick your battle; I don’t think you can win across the board.” Walbrun: “We absolutely can,” but “this is a long-term endeavor.” He said we will get there with innovation and careful market-driven scaling. Johnson: “Totally possible, really hard…We’re in a time in the U.S. of industrial policy and frankly state-sponsored capitalism…but at the end of the day, we need the industry to really align itself and have a vision for what the future of Western manufacturing is going to look like.” Hall had a word about relying on the government, however: “a terrible strategy”—DOE funding in one administration, revoked by the next. Johnson noted that this is one of those consistency pieces that we really need to succeed.
Johnson added that, “I want to invest in this space,” but “I have no idea what this industry looks like in five years or ten years, and that makes it really hard.” Hall shared her perspective that “given recent geopolitical stress around tariffs and restrictions on export coming from China, you do not want to tie yourself to that supply chain risk.”
Battery Markets
A mid-morning panel focused on the markets for batteries. Kyle Teamey, partner at RA Capital Management, opened, reminding the audience that 20-plus gigawatts of battery capacity is heading onto the US grid this year alone, even as the EV market has gone soft. But he said there’s an elephant in the room around how to get new chemistries to market. Joining him were Paul Lichty, CEO of Forge Nano (building a 3 GWh battery factory in North Carolina); Max von Polnitz, managing director of Ajinomoto Group Ventures; Randy Pettus, chief commercial officer at California cell manufacturer Nanotech Energy; and Michal Wolkin, joining remotely from Israel as a professor at Reichman University with additional board member and venture partner roles in the climate and sustainability space.
Although seated in the markets panel, Lichty made a strong point about underlying funding issues. “I think we’re all dealing with a hole in the capital markets for funds to go into the battery space … it looks just like a Northvolt-size hole,” referring to the bankrupt cell manufacturer. However, he pointed to a cluster of opportunity markets distinguished by not being dominated by the Chinese supply chain. “Defense is a market that everybody’s identified … it’s electrifying quickly,” he said. He noted opportunities “in robotics, AI, edge, on-device, [and] data centers.”
Wolkin framed the current outlook as driven by three macro forces: the AI power crunch, the rising prices of oil and gas, and the geopolitics requiring advanced defense solutions. All three are battery opportunities. “The question today is not, is the battery absolutely better, but which battery has very specific performance metrics for those new market applications,” she said. She gave examples of the need for safer aqueous electrolyte-based and sodium-ion batteries in storage applications and highlighted an opportunity for major scaling of batteries in specific defense applications.
Von Polnitz added a plug for a market opportunity: “The Japanese government is going [crazy] right now on deploying grants and capital into AI startups, physical infrastructure, biomanufacturing.” He said that as a key ally of the US, “I think you’re going to see a lot more collaboration between the two; it’s an opportunity for startups, for sure.”
Defense: It’s a Systems Sale, Not a Chemistry Sale
The panel reached a quick consensus on defense, but with cautions. Von Polnitz noted that, “the government doesn’t care about, in my opinion, the chemistry or the underlying tech … they only care about the end use application.” That framing “actually favors the incumbents more than it does startups because they know how to deal with the system, which, again, from a venture perspective, makes it much, much harder to fund early-stage battery companies who are engaging with the Department of Defense.”
Lichty put it more plainly: “The government doesn’t buy lithium-ion batteries—they buy weapons systems … If you’re not offering them a weapons system, it’s really not worth talking to them.” And the timeline is long. “If you’re thinking about approaching defense, you need to be very cognizant that that’s a 10-year endeavor, and there’s no fast way around that,” he said. Also, “it’s not a big market; we’re talking a couple gigawatt hours at maximum scale for defense.” It won’t be the boon that EVs were, “but it is the stepping stone that can get you and your technology to the next level,” he said.
The Data Center Trap
On data centers, Wolkin flagged a pattern she’s seen repeatedly. “One of the most common failures dealing with the hyperscalers is the trap of technology first—building a sophisticated solution that then is searching for the problem without understanding what they need.” The solution is that “founders should adopt the framework of identifying the customer, starting to work with the customer, getting the specs … even going to the business plan and the pricing, but at a very early stage.”
Teamey summarized: “You have to solve a customer problem at the end of the day.”
Beyond the Gigafactory Model
One of the panel’s most concrete threads was in manufacturing strategy. Teamey asked what the battery industry could borrow from biotech and semiconductors when it comes to cracking the manufacturing challenge, and discussion centered around non-milestone approaches. Von Polnitz had just referenced a startup, Sepion Technologies, that “went the full toll manufacturing route to come to market” (they outsourced manufacturing), noting it may not be what venture capital wants to underwrite, “but it’s a much more profitable way to bring something to market.”
Lichty isn’t anti-factory; Forge Nano is building one, but it’s designed with flexibility so it’s not single-customer, single-chemistry. “The adaptability of what we’re building out is as important as the scale, so that we can move quickly and work with some of the companies here that have something differentiated or have a customer base that needs something a little bit more unique.”
Pettus echoed the advantage of this approach. “I guess it came from the semiconductor industry, the fabless model,” he said. In 2021, Nanotech Energy bought land for a gigafactory, but “we scrapped that idea; we pivoted and changed our philosophy, sold that land.” Instead, they’re developing custom solutions and building a network of toll manufacturer partners to increase capacity.
Death by Automotive
Pettus spent 15 years in automotive materials before batteries, and he was direct about the challenge of engaging there. “Very seldom did I see any new material make its way from the R&D side actually on to a vehicle.” He explained that pieces like the production part approval process, the safety concerns, and the strictures of fitting into the model release-specific economics of a big OEM just make it really difficult to win.
Lichty agreed. “We really haven’t seen new technologies get fully adopted into the EV supply chain as long as I’ve been in the industry.” To clear this hurdle, you have to “show three years of flawless track record and warranty data, and then you can get adopted,” he said.
Auto OEMs were also cautioned against in the earlier panel. Walbrun, despite working with an OEM, said automotive is “extraordinarily hard as a customer” and suggested you’re better off proving your technology in power tools, drones, or storage first.
East vs. West Continues
In a lunchtime panel, we heard from Robert Galyen, a man with a rich history in battery manufacturing, intimately involved in the rise of Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL), the world’s largest EV battery manufacturer based in China. The question was posed by moderator Josh Stiling of Anzu Partners: “Why did CATL happen in China, and not here? And what, if anything, can the West do about it now?” The refrain: how does the US compete with China?
Galyen described four pillars that made CATL thrive: government support, private equity investment, available technology, and a final, key category he kept returning to—“the man and the machine.” He elaborated on point four to indicate this includes the education and training of people that can pursue research and development to work with machines that produce gigawatt-level cells at parts-per-billion failure rates, a feat that’s “almost impossible.” Later he added that scaling from consumer electronics to EVs was one of the most difficult things, that you must laser-focus on every step in the value chain or it will “jump up and bite you like a snake.”
Celina Mikolajczak also has a storied career, including time at Tesla, Uber, Panasonic Energy, QuantumScape, and Lyten. She took the opportunity to address innovation under her watch at Tesla, which from the outside may have appeared as simple incremental improvements. She called these “pretty breakthroughs,” numerous individual innovations at cell and pack level that “profoundly affected the vehicle performance.” One problem is that corporate innovation often stays hidden away. “They don’t publish papers because they’re trying to keep it in-house.” She also lamented how people think that if the government will just fund good innovative research, it will translate to domestic successes. “What a lot of people in these labs find is that they don’t have a customer in the U.S.,” because there’s no domestic cell maker. They may well end up selling their technology to the foreign market. “Innovation has to land somewhere,” she said.
Mikolajczak also cautioned that in many cases the customer settles for “good enough.” Even military buyers are cost-conscious and may purchase batteries that work for 90% of missions instead of spending more to get the ones that fit all purposes. Similarly, she provided an interesting anecdote from her time at Tesla. She said the early-generation batteries for model S were not ideal. Instead of waiting and optimizing further, though, they changed a different variable. “The superchargers were set specifically between cities, not in cities, because we knew that if you supercharged the cells we were buying then every day, your cell performance and degradation rates would be really high.”
Matthew Dawson, CEO of Elementium Materials, an electrolyte company, sees a path forward with innovation at the business model level, saying that “cost is everything”. With regard to materials, he said they have a thesis: “if you’re not able to get to a new material in two steps from a commodity chemical, you don’t have a chance of being competitive.” Finding partnerships with existing facilities and expertise has been a major part of their drive to producing “up to 25 GWh of capacity today,” he said. But it’s hard to compete with the east. “They’ve got this huge machine, untold amounts of money and personnel.” He pointed to one area primed for innovation: low-temperature applications, which includes drones, space, and the Arctic theater.
Mikolajczak also had something to say about the overall battery future. Her math shows that to meet 2050 climate goals, even ignoring new developments around AI, we need about 800 20-GWh battery factories, “which is about the same number as the number of oil refineries we have today.” To accomplish this, she says we really have to find ways to make raw materials and complete cells cheaper, faster, and at scale, because the current 20-GWh factory will cost you about $4 billion to install.
When Stiling asked for one thing the West needs to focus on in the next ten years to gain battery leadership, Galyen’s answer was relatively simple. “Execution,” he said. “You can’t worry about failure; you’ve just got to go out and get it done.” Mikolajczak reminded us that ten years is an eternity; 2012 Tesla and 2022 Tesla were worlds apart. She agreed with Galyen that execution is key, but she wanted to focus on bringing manufacturing home. “We have to have cell factories in the US; whether they’re American owned or foreign owned, it doesn’t actually matter,” she said, indicating this is how we’ll know where to innovate, and this is the direction the world is headed.
