The Los Angeles based battery tech company Romeo Power revealed last month that it had successfully closed 
on $30 million in seed funding — all raised entirely via its management team, via various family offices, and from those who have previously invested in CEO Mike Patterson’s companies. There was no venture capital involvement.
The company’s CEO also made the claim, in an interview with TechCrunch, that it had already secured $65 million in manufacturing contracts across 15 different customers. These customers reportedly include 5 auto industry firms and 2 of the “Detroit Big 3” manufacturers.
Assuming that that’s all true, it sounds like things are looking pretty bright for the firm. So, what exactly is it that they do?
The reason I pose that question, and what was interesting to me when I found out about it, is that the company doesn’t manufacture the battery cells that it uses, but rather purchases them from larger manufacturers and then packages them. This is where the company claims to be innovative — in the cell selection, materials, thermal management, and packaging processes.
According to the Romeo Power CEO, the company is able to increase energy density (as compared to “existing lithium-ion battery packs”) by between 25% and 200%. The firm’s tagline is: “The world’s most energy dense battery packs.”
So, the tech industry bluster is certainly there. What else is?
Tech Crunch provides more: “The 190-person company features a number of veterans of SpaceX, Samsung, Tesla, and Amazon, so there’s institutional know-how about manufacturing, procurement, design, and about battery packs specifically. Indeed, cofounder and CTO Porter Harris spent a year at Faraday Future as its chief battery architect; before that, he spent four years at SpaceX as an energy storage engineer. In fact, Porter has been working on batteries for the last decade, dating back to an earlier engineering gig at The Aerospace Corporation, in Southern California.”
That does make the company sound fairly substantial. It doesn’t sound as though it’s simply a money-making scam of some kind, as is the case with much of what comes out of the tech industry. We’ll keep you posted as the company’s plans come along.
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