The mark of two elements: carbon and silicon, sharing a column on the periodic table.
Company Profile · Battery Materials
Group14.
The company quietly trying to retire graphite - one ton of silicon material at a time.
The company quietly trying to retire graphite - one ton of silicon material at a time.
Inside a plant in Moses Lake, reactors are turning silane gas and a carbon scaffold into a fine charcoal-gray powder. The powder is called SCC55. It looks unremarkable. It is the reason Porsche, SK, and Microsoft's climate fund have collectively put more than a billion dollars into a company most people have never heard of.
Group14 Technologies does not make batteries. It makes the stuff that goes inside the part of the battery that stores the charge - the anode. For roughly thirty years, that part has been made of graphite, the same material in your pencil. Group14's whole proposition is that graphite has had a good run, and that silicon should take over.
The company ships SCC55 to more than 100 cell manufacturers - customers it says represent about 95% of global battery production. The material is the same lithium-ion form factor everyone already builds for. That is the trick: no new factory religion required, just a better powder.
A powder that looks like the inside of a dead campfire and behaves like the future. Not the most photogenic revolution.
Phones want to last two days. Cars want 500 miles. Aircraft want to leave the ground on stored electrons. They all run into the same wall: graphite anodes are near the limit of how much energy they can hold. You can engineer around it, but you cannot argue with chemistry.
Silicon has been the obvious answer for years - it can store far more lithium than graphite. The catch is that silicon swells violently when it charges, cracking itself apart over a few cycles. The element that promised the most was also the one that fell apart the fastest. A frustrating kind of genius.
There is a second problem stacked on the first - supply. Battery materials, and graphite in particular, run through concentrated global supply chains. A company building cars in Detroit or Stuttgart cannot count on that staying friction-free. Group14's answer to physics doubled as an answer to geography.
Group14 was spun out of EnerG2 in 2015 by Rick Luebbe and Dr. Rick Costantino - co-founders who had already built and sold a carbon-materials company to BASF. (Yes, both are named Rick. Meetings are confusing.) They had spent years making engineered carbon. Their bet: trap nano-sized silicon inside a hard carbon scaffold, so it has room to swell without tearing itself apart.
That scaffold is the company's name made literal. Group 14 of the periodic table is the column that contains both carbon and silicon. The two elements that refused to cooperate at scale became the entire business plan.
Costantino holds a Ph.D. from MIT and 60-plus patents. Luebbe handles the part where you convince Porsche to write a nine-figure check.
Picture a microscopic sponge made of hard carbon. Now fill its pores with silicon. When the battery charges, the silicon expands - but it expands into the empty space inside the sponge instead of cracking the structure. That is SCC55: silicon-carbon composite, 55 a nod to the formulation.
Works with existing lithium-ion manufacturing. Cell makers don't rebuild their lines to use it.
About 50% more energy density, so the same cell holds more charge or the same charge fits in less space.
Supports extreme fast charging - the trait phones, EVs, and eVTOLs all keep asking for.
Luebbe and Costantino launch Group14 in Woodinville, Washington.
ATL, BASF, Cabot, Showa Denko and SK Materials back the early bet on silicon.
Plus a $100M+ US Department of Energy award to build domestic capacity.
SCC55 named to TIME's Best Inventions of 2022 in Green Energy.
Construction starts in Moses Lake on a factory built to be the world's largest of its kind.
SCC55 ships to 100+ EV and consumer electronics customers worldwide.
Led by SK, Inc.; Group14 buys full ownership of its South Korea factory. Total raised tops $1B.
A timeline that reads like a slow-motion conviction: more money, more steel, more silicon, every single year.
Conviction is cheap. Capital is not. Here's where the money actually landed, round by round - the curve that turned a Woodinville lab into a billion-dollar materials company.
Bars scaled to the largest round. The Series C is the tall one; the Series D is the one that proved 2021 wasn't a fluke.
The customer roster matters more than the cap table. Group14 says its 100-plus customers represent roughly 95% of global battery production - the kind of figure that's hard to fake, because batteries either work in the field or they don't.
The mission sounds grand until you notice how literally the company takes it. EVs, aviation, eVTOLs, grid storage, AI-hungry data centers, the phone in your pocket - each needs more energy in the same space, and each is bottlenecked at the anode. Group14 isn't trying to win one of those markets. It's trying to sit one layer underneath all of them.
It's also building that layer at home. The push into US silane and material production - backed by federal money - is about making sure the silicon battery era doesn't depend on a supply chain that runs through a single country. The mission is decarbonization; the method, unglamorously, is owning the factory.
Return to that plant. The reactors are still running, the gray powder still piling up, still unremarkable to look at. But every ton that leaves the building is a ton of graphite that didn't have to be mined, shipped, and packed into a cell - and a little more range, charge, or runtime for whatever it ends up inside.
Graphite isn't gone. Revolutions in materials are slow, and silicon still has to earn each design win one cell at a time. But the direction has stopped being a question. The company that started as two Ricks and a carbon scaffold now supplies most of the industry that builds the world's batteries.
Somewhere in Washington State, graphite is losing its job. It's losing it to a powder you'd mistake for the inside of a dead campfire - and to a company that decided silicon's biggest flaw was just an engineering problem nobody had finished solving.