Double boost for quick charging EV solid-state battery system

The company has also closed a seed round with $5.15m in funding led by Primavera Capital Group, with participation by Rhapsody Venture Partners and MassVentures.

The license and the venture funding will enable the start-up to scale Harvard’s laboratory prototype toward commercial deployment of a solid-state lithium-metal battery with the potential to provide reliable and fast charging for future EVs.

Developed by researchers in the lab of Xin Li, PhD, Associate Professor of Materials Science at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), the lab-scale coin-cell prototype has achieved battery charge rates as fast as three minutes with over 10,000 cycles in a lifetime. It is also said to high energy density and a level of material stability that overcomes the safety challenges posed by some other lithium batteries. The team’s results have been published in Nature and other journals.

Adden Energy was co-founded in 2021 by Li, along with William Fitzhugh, PhD ’20, and Luhan Ye, PhD ’22, both of whom contributed to the development of the technology as graduate students in Li’s Harvard lab. Fred Hu, PhD ’93, founder and Chairman of Primavera Capital, is also a founder of Adden Energy.