Somewhere in West Texas, 900 batteries that used to power electric vehicles are now quietly running the grid. They didn't end up in a smelter. They didn't sit in a warehouse depreciating. They're working - stacked inside a 53-megawatt-hour installation that Anthony Stratakos, CEO of Element Energy, commissioned in 2024. It's the largest second-life battery storage project on earth, and it runs on software his team invented.
That's not the kind of milestone you stumble into. It's the result of a very deliberate pivot - from a man who spent nearly two decades in the power management semiconductor business, building the chips that quietly run your laptop and server rack, to someone who looked at the coming wave of retired EV batteries and saw something most of the industry called a liability. Stratakos called it inventory.
The Doctor Who Became an Engineer
Stratakos showed up at Johns Hopkins in 1988 planning to be a doctor. Hopkins, having none of it, informed him there was no pre-med major. His father was an electrical engineer. His brother was an electrical engineer. The path was there. He took it - and ended up earning both his bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from Hopkins before enrolling in the PhD program at UC Berkeley in 1992.
At Berkeley, something notable happened before the degree was even finished. In 1996, while still a graduate student, Stratakos co-founded Volterra Semiconductor with Craig Teuscher in Fremont, California. Volterra made mixed-signal integrated circuits for power management - the unglamorous but essential business of telling electrons where to go and how fast, without wasting them. The company went public in 2004. It was acquired by Maxim Integrated roughly nine years later.
"Engineers have a moral obligation to work on humanity's most critical problems."
- Anthony Stratakos, CEO, Element EnergyAt Maxim, Stratakos climbed. Vice President of Advanced R&D. Senior Vice President. Then, in 2015, Chief Technology Officer. He ran Technology Development, Advanced Packaging, Platform IP Creation, and new product line incubation for one of the semiconductor industry's most established names. By any conventional measure, the career arc was complete. Senior executive. Fortune 500 company. Thirty years of accumulated domain expertise.
He left in 2017.
The Problem Worth Quitting For
Two years of consulting and advisory work followed, which reads - in the vocabulary of someone like Stratakos - less like coasting and more like thinking. The problem he kept returning to was climate change. And within that problem: batteries.
The electric vehicle market was beginning its acceleration. Behind that acceleration trailed an uncomfortable arithmetic: EV batteries don't die when cars retire them. A battery that drops to 80% of its original capacity gets pulled from a vehicle - it's no longer safe or efficient enough for driving. But 80% is substantial. Grid storage doesn't need a battery to perform like new. It needs it to store and release energy reliably, which a well-managed "retired" battery can do for years.
The catch was management. Battery packs assembled from used cells are more complex than new ones. Each cell has a different history. Different degradation patterns. Different failure modes. Conventional battery management systems weren't built for this variability. They average across cells. When one cell in a pack is struggling, the whole pack throttles. When a cell fails silently, the pack can fail catastrophically.
Element Energy's BMS Advantage
In September 2019, Stratakos co-founded Element Energy with a clear thesis: build software that can monitor, model, and manage each cell in a battery pack independently, in real time. Not averaging. Individual. The result was an adaptive BMS architecture - a system that knows the history of every cell and adjusts how it uses them accordingly. The company filed patents covering adaptive electrochemical cell management, degradation mechanism identification, thermal management, and fault isolation. By 2026, 28 issued patents bear Stratakos's name.
"The problem I am most passionate about solving is climate change. We can deploy battery energy storage at less than half the current cost while reducing megatons of battery waste headed to landfills."
Raising the Money to Prove It
Element Energy raised a $28 million Series B in December 2022, co-led by a major clean energy generation company and Cohort Ventures, with participation from LG Technology Ventures, Edison International, Prelude Ventures, and Radar Partners. Eleven months later, in November 2023, the round extended to $111 million total - $73 million in equity plus a $38 million debt facility from Keyframe Capital Partners. Total funding: $181.9 million.
The money went toward proving the thesis at scale. In May 2024, Element Energy commissioned the West Texas installation through ERCOT - 53 megawatt-hours, 900 retired EV batteries, the largest second-life grid-connected battery project the world had seen. The same year, the U.S. Department of Energy announced $7.9 million in additional funding for a 50 MWh second-life deployment in ERCOT. TIME put Element Energy on its list of America's Top GreenTech Companies 2024.
What the Technology Actually Does
The BMS problem is harder than it looks. A new battery pack is a controlled system - identical cells, known history, predictable behavior. A second-life pack is the opposite. The cells came from different vehicles, different climates, different drivers. Some were charged aggressively. Some sat unused for months. Each has a unique degradation signature.
Element Energy's architecture addresses this with distributed control. Rather than treating the pack as a unit, the system treats each cell individually. Algorithms monitor each cell's electrochemical state, build a model of its degradation mechanisms, and adjust load accordingly. A weaker cell gets protected. A stronger cell does more work. The pack as a whole lives longer and delivers more energy.
Element Energy's adaptive BMS can identify specific failure mechanisms at the cell level - not just detect that something is wrong, but diagnose which degradation pathway is active, then adjust operating parameters to slow it down.
The safety dimension matters too. Battery fires aren't abstract - they've burned warehouses, totaled vehicles, and generated regulatory scrutiny across the industry. Stratakos's team built fault detection and isolation into the architecture, with algorithms designed to catch anomalies before they cascade. A single cell behaving unusually can be isolated from the pack before it becomes a thermal event. For second-life systems, where cell-to-cell variability is high, this isn't optional.
From Semiconductors to the Grid
There's a straight line from Volterra Semiconductor to Element Energy that Stratakos probably doesn't need to explain but rarely needs to draw either. Power management is power management. At Volterra, the problem was regulating voltage inside a microprocessor - millisecond response times, extreme precision, tiny form factors. At Element Energy, the problem is managing energy across a pack of cells - longer time horizons, distributed control, but the same fundamental challenge: match supply to demand, protect the components, maximize efficiency.
The semiconductor background shows in how Element Energy approaches IP. The company didn't just build a product - it built a patent portfolio. Adaptive electrochemical cell management. Degradation mechanism identification. Thermal management in multi-module systems. Battery stacks with isolation and bypass switches. In-situ leakage current testing. These are the kinds of filings that come from people who understand how to build defensible technology, not just functional technology.
The Pipeline and What Comes Next
In November 2024, Element Energy announced a partnership with LG Energy Solution Vertech for turnkey second-life battery energy storage systems. LG's manufacturing scale combined with Element's BMS is a combination that can move the market in a way neither could alone. The deal signals that second-life batteries aren't a niche experiment anymore.
The company now has nearly 2 gigawatt-hours of second-life EV batteries under management and awaiting deployment. To put that in context: 2 GWh is enough to power tens of thousands of homes for an extended period, and it's capacity that didn't require mining a single additional pound of lithium, cobalt, or nickel. It already exists. It just needed better software to be trusted.
Stratakos has been clear about the stakes. Leveraging second-life batteries, he has said, could help the U.S. reduce annual CO2 emissions by more than 10 million metric tons per year by 2030. The arithmetic behind that figure is simple: cheaper grid storage means more renewable energy can be absorbed and dispatched, which displaces fossil fuels. The path runs through old batteries and good software.
"The problem I am most passionate about solving is climate change."
- Anthony StratakosThe Career Behind the Bet
It's worth pausing on what Stratakos walked away from. CTO of Maxim Integrated is not a restless perch. Maxim, before its acquisition by Analog Devices in 2021, was a $20+ billion semiconductor company. Stratakos had built his career inside the industry, knew it deeply, and had every reason to stay. The choice to leave - and then to start a company targeting a problem that most investors still viewed with skepticism in 2019 - was not obvious.
The moral framing he uses is notable. Engineers, he says, have an obligation to work on critical problems. This isn't the language of someone chasing a market opportunity. It's the language of someone who has done the math on where their skills can matter most and pointed themselves at the answer. The semiconductor career gave him 28 patents, a public company exit, and a CTO role. The climate problem gave him a reason to start over.
Element Energy's 56-person team is building the infrastructure for a world where a battery's useful life doesn't end when a car retires it. Where grid storage gets cheaper not because of new chemistry, but because of better software. Where megatons of battery waste become a resource instead of a liability. Anthony Stratakos is mid-stride on that project. Catching up requires knowing he was running before most people knew the race had started.