When CEO Robert Bagheri founded battery manufacturing company Sakuu 10 years ago, he recognized something critical about the industry: it just isn’t agile.
“The process has changed very little in the past 30 years, and factories today can’t keep pace with new value propositions and/or changes in the battery supply chain,” he says. Sakuu is trying to change that—and ultimately make it possible to bring battery manufacturing back to U.S. shores.
In an interview with Chief Executive, Bagheri explains how the company’s 3D manufacturing processes are making battery production more sustainable and cost-effective, and what’s next for the company on their journey to create the new gold-standard for battery production.
Tell us about Sakuu and your 3D manufacturing processes using materials that are safer and less prone to thermal runaway and explosive fires.
At Sakuu, we are transforming manufacturing to power a more sustainable future and bring production home, wherever home may be for various markets. We provide commercial-scale printing equipment and technologies to manufacturers producing batteries, electrodes and supercapacitors for AI-focused data centers.
Our R&D and tech innovations enable our partner OEMs and cell producers to scale up their production and make it cost-effective to bring and keep manufacturing home at a competitive cost. I believe that electrification is the key to addressing our environmental challenges, and that therefore the battery manufacturing industry is crucial to maintaining America’s prosperity and national security.
Electric vehicles, health devices, consumer electronics and defense applications are limited in performance and sustainability by the batteries that power them—due to battery weight, environmental and health hazards involved in the manufacturing process, and the lack of domestic supply. But Sakuu is now making it possible to bring manufacturing back to U.S. shores.
In a perfect world, batteries are safe, sustainable and harmless. They can store large amounts of electricity for a long enough period of time to power small appliances as well as solar and wind farms, and are robust enough to provide backup energy for AI data centers and the energy grid.
When I co-founded Sakuu 10 years ago, we recognized that traditional battery manufacturing just isn’t agile. The process has changed very little in the past 30 years, and factories today can’t keep pace with new value propositions and/or changes in the battery supply chain.
Next-generation batteries and new chemistries can require a complete redesign of the existing factories—a costly process that gobbles time, impedes innovation and wastes resources. We need improved production technology to scale a new wave of manufacturing capability to improve both profits and carbon footprints, which enables all countries to bring manufacturing home and become independent of globally restricted supply chains.
Our Kavian Manufacturing Platform is a groundbreaking dry-process electrode manufacturing platform engineered to transform the production of battery and supercapacitor electrodes. Kavian enables high-speed, solvent-free fabrication of electrodes with unmatched precision and scalability.
Through additive 3D printing manufacturing, Kavian is able to dry print a completed electrode on a single platform, significantly reducing manufacturing footprint, costs and environmental impact. We have 113 patents in material, process and manufacturing, along with 130-plus trade secrets in critical chemistry and process intellectual property.
Changing the way lithium-ion batteries are manufactured also makes them even safer and virtually eliminates the possibility of catastrophic heat production resulting in a fire. Lithium-ion battery cells made with composite conductive materials—or polymeric current collectors—are built with a different architecture so that when there is a short, the energy dissipates over the course of hours without ignition leading to a thermal event.
This isn’t a new type of architecture, but the standard wet process used in battery manufacturing doesn’t support its mass-production. Changing the production platform used in battery manufacturing plants to support a multi-material dry printing process makes these safer batteries economically feasible—including within the U.S.—and provides drastic energy density improvements.
How will emerging lithium battery technologies disrupt the storage market?
Once you eliminate the possibilities of fire associated with battery production, you change the risk profile of battery energy storage system facilities, how they’re built, and where they can be safely located to alleviate consumer resistance and NIMBY-ism. And the smaller footprint of these new facilities means they can be built at a lower cost and in less time.
However, battling inertia to adopt new ways of doing things is always a hurdle. There’s been some industry skepticism around the appropriateness of dry printing lithium-ion battery electrodes, especially the cathode. Can it be trusted to produce a battery that consistently meets or exceeds performance of the ones manufactured using a wet process, and be done cost-effectively and at scale?
The answer is yes. We designed our Kavian platform to support a wide range of active materials so that manufacturers can process today’s most widely used chemistries, and be ready for emerging innovations, all on the same platform.
We’ve validated performance in full cells across a variety of materials. For example, we recently validated that a lithium-ion battery cell with a fully dry-printed nickel-cobalt-manganese (NCM) cathode could go 4,412 cycles before dropping below an 80 percent energy retention, what’s considered the minimum battery health for an EV. That’s just unheard-of longevity. By comparison, a typical NCM battery cell might cycle just 2,000 times before falling below 80 percent viability.
And note that this wasn’t a one-off “hero” cell or with any new materials or manufacturing optimization—we’re actually batch-processing these cells.
What’s next for Sakuu?
Our primary mission at Sakuu is for our Kavian platform to become the gold standard for battery manufacturing everywhere.
We want to help our partners build state-of-the-art gigafactories to scale up production of safe, long cycle-life, high-performance sustainable batteries and supercapacitors at the very large scale needed to support the electrification of everything in the AI era. We’re also supporting them in building small battery packs for mobility and non-grid storage solutions for industrial, telecom and data center applications.
And of course, with Kavian, batteries don’t need to be standalone energy storage devices. In the near future, batteries can be printed into all types of flexible forms, molded and integrated into the structure of the battery-operated device, saving weight and reducing cost. Kavian already allows manufacturers to test and refine new battery designs and material using the size, shape and specifications that fit their products, instead of building products to accommodate the batteries of the past.
Whether it’s EV batteries, grid storage or supercapacitors for AI data centers, at Sakuu, we’re primed to help energy innovators and battery technology leaders sustainably dry print the energy storage of the future, in whatever form factor they require.
