His PhD advisor invented the lithium-ion battery, then told him to build what people need instead of what they want. Twelve years later, that one line still runs Enpower Greentech.
In 2012, two young researchers walked into their mentor's office at the University of Texas at Austin and asked a simple question: what kind of company should we build? The mentor was John B. Goodenough, the scientist who had co-invented the lithium-ion battery cathode that powers most of the modern world. His answer was not a market analysis. It was a sentence. "Do what people need," he told them, "not what people want."
One of those researchers was Sam Dai. The other was Che Yong, his friend and fellow post-doc. That afternoon became the founding of Enpower Greentech, and that single line of advice became the company's operating philosophy. More than a decade later, Dai still repeats it. It is the closest thing the company has to a slogan, and it explains a lot about why the company looks the way it does.
Dai did not start out planning to build batteries. He studied physics at Tsinghua University in Beijing, earning both a bachelor's and a master's degree there. Physics is a discipline that trains you to reduce a messy problem to its underlying rules, and that instinct shows up in how he talks about energy storage - not as a product category, but as a set of constraints you have to respect.
He moved to the United States for a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering at UT Austin, where he ended up in Goodenough's orbit. It is hard to overstate what that meant. Goodenough's cathode work made the lithium-ion battery practical, and in 2019 he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it, becoming, at 97, the oldest person ever to receive a Nobel. To study battery materials under him was to sit at the source of the field.
What Dai took from Goodenough was not only chemistry. It was a posture. Goodenough encouraged purpose-driven science and independent thinking - the idea that you should chase the problem that matters rather than the problem that is fashionable. For a founder, that turns out to be an unusual filter. Most startups are built to catch a wave. Enpower Greentech was built to solve something slow and hard: making batteries that are both safer and denser at the same time.
Before he was a founder, Dai spent a long stretch inside big companies, and he does not treat that time as a preamble. He worked at Hewlett-Packard as a Master Engineer and R&D Manager, then served as a senior R&D director and chief technology officer at a US renewable energy firm. Across those roles he logged around fifteen years leading product innovation and commercialization inside billion-dollar businesses spanning batteries, clean energy, and semiconductors.
That resume matters because battery startups tend to die in a specific place - the gap between a promising cell in a lab and a cell you can manufacture by the million without it catching fire or degrading. Dai had already spent years on the industrial side of that gap. When he says he has led a company "from lab development to production," it is not aspiration. It is the part of the job most scientists never learn to do.
Enpower Greentech makes battery cells, but not the commodity kind. Its work centers on semi-solid-state, lithium-metal, and silicon-rich chemistries - the family of technologies loosely grouped under the "solid-state" banner that the industry has spent years promising and rarely delivering. The company sells cells across three platforms it calls SWIFT, FLEET, and KOSMOS, and its stated target is energy density above 500 watt-hours per kilogram, well past what a typical lithium-ion cell delivers today.
The choice of where to aim those cells says something about the "need" Goodenough was talking about. Enpower's targets are drones, electric two-wheelers, eVTOL aircraft, and robotics - applications where a heavy or unreliable battery is a dealbreaker, not an inconvenience. When a battery has to lift itself into the air, every extra gram and every safety margin is real. These are the hard cases, the ones where better chemistry actually changes what is possible.
The company grew into something genuinely global. It runs research and manufacturing across the United States, China, Japan, and Germany, and reports shipping more than three million solid-state cells to customers. It maintains a long-term research collaboration with the Goodenough Lab at UT Austin - the same bench where Dai and Che Yong trained - which keeps the company tied to fundamental work on anodes, solid electrolytes, and the interfaces between them.
Founding stories usually get flattened into one name, but Enpower Greentech is a two-person origin. Dai co-founded it with Che Yong, who became the chief technology officer. They were not strangers who met through an accelerator; they were friends who had shared the same post-doctoral world under the same advisor. That kind of partnership - built on years of working side by side before there was ever a company - tends to survive the parts of a startup that break weaker teams.
It also fits the pattern of how Dai seems to operate. He is not the archetype of the young founder disrupting an industry he just discovered. He is the opposite: someone who spent a long time learning the science, then a long time learning the business, and only then put the two together with a person he trusted. Patience is not usually celebrated in startup culture. In battery chemistry, it is closer to a prerequisite.
For a company this size, Dai keeps a low profile. He does not appear to run a public Twitter feed or flood conferences with keynotes. The clearest external marker came in 2024, when he was selected for Unreasonable Impact Asia Pacific - a program run by the Unreasonable Group and Barclays that backs growth-stage entrepreneurs whose businesses solve pressing global problems. Being named an Unreasonable Fellow put him in a cohort of founders whose companies are judged partly on whether they meet a real need in the world.
There is a neat symmetry there. Goodenough told two post-docs to build what people need. A decade later, a fellowship built entirely around that idea recognized one of them. The advice did not just shape the company's internal culture - it turned out to describe the category the company competes in.
Solid-state batteries have been "five years away" for most of the past decade. Plenty of well-funded companies have promised the breakthrough and quietly walked it back. What is interesting about Dai's version of the story is that he never seems to have treated it as a race to a press release. The company shipped cells - millions of them - while building patents and manufacturing capacity in parallel. That is a less dramatic path than a single miracle cell, but it is a more durable one.
His career reads like a series of long apprenticeships stacked on top of each other. Physics, then materials science, then corporate R&D, then a startup he has now run for over a decade. At each stage he stayed long enough to actually learn the thing. In an industry full of founders who optimize for speed, Dai optimized for depth, and the depth is what let him keep going when the easy money and the easy headlines moved on to something newer.
Whether Enpower Greentech becomes a household name is still an open question - hard tech rarely resolves on a tidy schedule. But the shape of the bet is clear, and it traces straight back to that office in Austin. A Nobel laureate handed two friends a rule about need over want. One of them built a company on it, kept his head down, and let the cells do the talking. In a field crowded with promises, that is its own kind of statement.