Dyson Buys Sakti3
Originally published on EV Obsession.
The well respected consumer electronics company Dyson has agreed to acquire the solid-state lithium-ion battery startup Sakti3 for $90 million, according to recent reports. Previous to this announcement, the British company had already agreed to invest $15 million into Sakti3.
The news founder and primary engineer of Dyson, James Dyson, spoke to USA Today recently, confirming the news. James Dyson also noted that his company was now planning to develop a new battery factory for the technology, and that the company would be utilizing the solid-state technology to improve the battery life of its products.
While the news is interesting, solid-state battery technologies still aren’t quite mature — it’s a bit of an open question how long it will take for Dyson to begin using the technology in its products.
Green Car Congress provides more:
The acquisition, noted the report, will fuel speculation that Dyson possibly seek to become a supplier of electric-drivetrain technology. In August 2014, Sakti3 announced that it had produced a battery cell on fully scalable equipment with more than 1100 Watt hours per liter (Wh/l) in volumetric energy density.
Although solid-state cells can address some of the issues attendant to using Lithium metal anodes — especially safety and cycle performance — such solid state cells have been difficult to make, and have not been successfully produced in large scale, Sakti3 noted in one of its patent applications.
Sakti3 is developing a thin-film manufacturing process using physical vapor deposition to lay down a cathode barrier, cathode current collector, cathode, electrolyte, anode, anode current collector, and anode barrier over a substrate. As an example outlined in the patent application, Sakti3 describes using a lithium vanadium oxide cathode with a Lithium anode, the latter being overlaid with an anode barrier material of Li3PO4.
The CEO of Sakti3, Ann Marie Sastry, commented back in 2014 that: “Our target is to achieve mass production of cells at ~$100/kWh. Our key patents on the technology have been issued, we are up and running on larger tooling, and can now speed up processing. Our first market will be consumer electronics, and after that, we’ll move to other sectors.”
Worth noting here is that the German company Bosch recently purchased the solid-state battery startup Seeo.
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$90 million? That is a pretty small amount. They must have been close to going under.
It is hard to fund a company these days, the money goes into hedge funds then offshore.
Lets hope Dyson and Bosch put some money and manufacturing scale skills into speeding these babies to market.
Bosch and Dyson are established companies with a strong engineering culture and pockets deep enough for a long development haul. The bets they are placing on this technology are informed ones. That’s no guarantee of success, of course.
I agree, both Bosch and Dyson are pretty sharp. Dyson came out of nowhere many years ago with a different technology and since we have seen many copy their designs. With the $15 million investment in Satki3 by Dyson, I’m sure that they got to delve as deeply into the technology as they wanted. Thus, they must have liked what they saw. What I wonder is that with the potential of this technology, how they got it for such a low price. Maybe there are some hurdles that Dyson saw that made it worth buying the company, but they aren’t going to bet the company on it. There may be considerable risk involved. Unfortunately, EVs won’t be advanced because of Satki3, the vacuum cleaner market will get the first commercial production.
Awesome…can you imagine a megawatt hour battery that fits in a cubic meter and “only” costs 100k usd. step by step…..
Keep imagining. This woman is a fraud. Solid-state batteries are a complete fraud. The Seeo Semi-solid electrolyte doesn’t work at anything under 87 degrees & the Sakti3 electrolyte needs to be 30,000 in density to charge a cell phone.