Walk the floor of almost any battery factory on earth and you will find the same three-part ritual: a slurry mixed with a nasty industrial solvent called NMP, held together by a fluorinated binder, then baked dry in an oven the length of a bowling alley. It works. It also burns enormous amounts of energy, requires million-dollar solvent-recovery systems, and leaves behind a "forever chemical" that regulators in Europe are moving to ban. Ateios Systems looked at that ritual and asked a stubborn question: what if you never needed the oven at all?
The answer is a Newberry, Indiana company of about a dozen people that has spent the better part of a decade making the least glamorous part of a battery - the electrode - dramatically cheaper and cleaner to produce. Most battery startups chase new chemistry: better cathodes, exotic anodes, solid-state dreams a decade out. Ateios went the other way, straight at the coating machine everyone else treats as fixed plumbing.
01 / What they doSelling the recipe, not just the cake
Ateios makes lithium-ion battery electrodes - and, more importantly, licenses the process for making them. That process is called RaiCure. Instead of dissolving electrode materials in solvent and drying them with heat, RaiCure uses energy-curable polymers that set almost instantly under light, the same physics behind UV inks and coatings. No solvent. No fluorinated PVDF binder. No forever chemicals. The finished electrodes are sold under the RaiCore name and come in the flavors battery makers actually use: LCO, NMC, LFP, and synthetic graphite.
The pitch is almost anticlimactic in its practicality: same batteries, made for less, without the poison. RaiCure is designed as a "drop-in" - it fits onto existing coating lines rather than demanding a new factory. That is a deliberate choice, and a large part of why the company has customers instead of a science-fair project.
02 / The speed problemThree times faster, measured on the line
Speed is the number that makes battery engineers lean in. Conventional fluorine-based electrode coating tops out around 30 meters per minute, throttled by how fast an oven can drive off solvent without cracking the coating. RaiCure cures with light, so the bottleneck disappears. In a demonstration with its scale-up partner, Ateios ran the process at 80 meters per minute while still laying down thick coatings above 5 mAh/cm² - the kind of dense electrode that usually fights you at high speed.
"Manufacturing breakthroughs are what make transformative technologies ubiquitous."Rajan Kumar, Co-Founder & CEO
03 / The problem it solvesGetting ahead of the PFAS ban
The dirty secret of the "clean" battery is PVDF, the binder that glues electrode particles together. It belongs to the PFAS family of "forever chemicals" now facing sweeping restrictions, especially in Europe. Most of the industry is treating that as a future headache. Ateios read the regulatory calendar and built the compliant version early. Its process is certified PFAS-free by Intertek, an independent lab - not a marketing claim but an outside report a procurement team can hand to their compliance department.
There is a second problem hiding inside the first. NMP solvent recovery and the long drying ovens are among the most expensive, energy-hungry parts of a gigafactory. Strip them out and the economics shift. Ateios cites up to a 96% cut in electrode energy use and claims dramatic reductions in both the operating and capital cost of a coating line. Less energy, less equipment, less floor space - a gigafactory that does more in a smaller box.
04 / Who buys itFrom wearables to a Fortune 100 order
Because RaiCure is chemistry-agnostic, the customer list is wide by design: battery cell makers and advanced-materials companies serving electric vehicles, consumer electronics, wearables and IoT, medical devices, and defense. The company has secured pilot commercial orders for LFP and synthetic graphite electrodes, and - the credibility marker that matters most - a commercial order for its PFA-free RaiCore LCO electrodes from a Fortune 100 electronics OEM.
That range is the whole strategy. Ateios did not bet on which battery chemistry wins the next decade. It built the manufacturing layer that sits underneath all of them. When you cannot predict the winning mine, sell the pickaxe that fits every one.
05 / Where it came fromStretchable stickers to a rural battery lab
Ateios did not start as an electrode company. Founded in 2017 by Rajan Kumar and Carlos Munoz out of the University of California, San Diego, its first act was research into stretchable, sticker-thin batteries for wearables and IoT. The interesting part, they realized, was not the sticker. It was the way the sticker got made. So they pivoted from selling batteries to selling the method - and in 2019 moved the company from San Diego to the Battery Innovation Center outside Bloomington, Indiana, where the manufacturing equipment already lived.
"The same way Moore's Law for microchips has changed the world, the next generation of computing will be enabled by an acceleration in energy storage."Dr. Rajan Kumar
That move - go where the machines already are, instead of raising millions to buy your own - is the quiet reason a twelve-person team has hit milestones far above its weight class. Kumar has described the incubation model as exceeding expectations, "enabling groundbreaking milestones with minimal time and capital."
06 / The partnersWhy a film company is now in batteries
In September 2025, Ateios announced a partnership with Eastman Kodak - yes, the film company. It is less strange than it sounds. Kodak spent a century perfecting how to coat delicate layers onto moving webs of material at high speed with in-line quality scanning. That is almost exactly the skill an electrode line needs. Kodak's pilot and full-scale lines can run RaiCure at 100+ meters per minute on widths up to 1.5 meters, with the capacity for 2+ GWh of annual electrode output.
"With Kodak, we've shown that sustainability, scalability, high yields, and speed can coexist without compromising performance."Rajan Kumar, CEO
Kodak's CTO, Terry Taber, framed it in the language battery buyers care about: RaiCure "can be deployed as a drop-in solution for faster, environmentally friendly electrode coating at manufacturing scale." Between the Battery Innovation Center, the Intertek certification, the Kodak scale-up, and an endorsement from Nobel laureate Stan Whittingham, Ateios has assembled an unusual amount of outside validation for its size.
07 / The moneySix years, two rounds, patient by design
Ateios raised a $1.25M seed in 2020, led by Good Growth Capital, then took six years before its next priced round - a $7.25M Series A in March 2026, led by TitletownTech, with a long roster of returning and new investors. In deep-tech hardware, that gap is not a warning sign; it is the clock. Along the way the company won $1M in TitletownTech's inaugural Start-Up Draft and picked up NSF SBIR support.
Craig Dickman of TitletownTech, who joined the board, put the investment case plainly: Ateios "is addressing a real constraint in battery manufacturing with a solution that can be embedded into existing production lines today."
08 / The road hereMilestones, earliest to latest
09 / The catchWhere the bet could still miss
None of this is guaranteed. Being a drop-in on a demo line is not the same as running clean for a year of 24/7 production, and battery makers are famously slow and conservative about qualifying a new material into a cell they will warranty. Many of the headline figures - speed, energy savings, cost cuts - are the company's own, verified in pilot settings rather than at full gigafactory scale. RaiCure earns its place if the economics and yields hold when someone is making millions of cells. That is the test still ahead. What is already clear is the shape of the bet: that the next real gain in batteries comes not from a new element on the periodic table, but from finally fixing the machine that has coated them the same way for forty years.