battery-technology
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Sam Dai
Sam Dai is the co-founder and CEO of Enpower Greentech, a battery cell maker building semi-solid-state, lithium-metal, and silicon-rich cells. Trained as a physicist at Tsinghua and a materials scientist at UT Austin under Nobel laureate John B. Goodenough, he started the company in 2012 with fellow post-doc Che Yong. The company has shipped over 3 million solid-state cells, holds more than 100 patents, and runs facilities across the US, China, Japan, and Germany. Dai was selected for Unreasonable Impact Asia Pacific 2024.
Jin Lim
Jin-Myoung Lim is the co-founder, CEO, and CTO of ACT-ion Battery Technologies, a Dallas-based deep-tech startup reinventing how cathode active materials (CAM) are made for lithium-ion batteries. A PhD mechanical engineer from Seoul National University with 2,272+ research citations and an h-index of 27, Lim spun ACT-ion out of Hunt Energy Enterprises in 2019 with a bold thesis: that the biggest bottleneck in the battery supply chain isn't the chemistry - it's the manufacturing process. His Hydro4Crystal platform produces coated single-crystal CAMs continuously, with lower energy, cost, and emissions than any incumbent method, and it works across chemistries from LFP to NMC. In 2024, the technology won an R&D 100 Award. By late 2025, ACT-ion had raised $11.5 million from BASF Venture Capital, LG Technology Ventures, Mirae Asset Capital, and Korean institutional investors, and was breaking ground on a pilot plant in Carrollton, Texas.
Dan Cook
Dan Cook is the CEO, Co-founder, and Investor at Lyten Inc, a San Jose-based deep-tech company pioneering 3D Graphene supermaterial and next-generation lithium-sulfur batteries. With over three decades spanning General Motors, NeXT Computer (under Steve Jobs), Bay Networks/Nortel, and private equity at Cerberus Capital, Cook pivoted to found Lyten in 2015 around a serendipitous discovery: trying to turn methane into clean hydrogen, the team accidentally created a revolutionary 3D graphene material. Under his leadership, Lyten has raised over $1.2 billion, shipped lithium-sulfur A-samples to automotive and military customers, announced the world's first lithium-sulfur gigafactory in Reno, Nevada, and in 2025-2026 acquired significant Northvolt assets across Europe to become one of the largest battery manufacturers on the continent.
Thomas Sisto
Thomas Sisto is the CEO and co-founder of XL Batteries, a Marlborough, Massachusetts startup commercializing water-based organic flow batteries for long-duration, grid-scale energy storage. A synthetic organic chemist by training, Sisto discovered the company's core molecule during a Columbia University postdoc - a compound he originally designed for solar cells that turned out to be extraordinarily stable in pH-neutral saltwater. He spun XL out of Columbia in 2019 and has since steered it from a lab curiosity to its first commercial pilot, betting that cheap, abundant organic chemicals can break China's grip on the battery supply chain.
William Fitzhugh
William Fitzhugh is the co-founder and CEO of Adden Energy, a Harvard spin-out scaling a self-healing, solid-state lithium-metal battery that has charged in as little as three minutes and survived more than 10,000 cycles in lab cells. A Harvard PhD in applied physics, he is trying to turn a coin-cell breakthrough into a roll-to-roll pilot line and, eventually, batteries that let an EV recharge in the time it takes to fill a gas tank.
Jared O'Leary
Jared O'Leary is the Co-Founder and CEO of SirenOpt, a deep-tech startup commercializing PlasmaSens - a manufacturing intelligence platform that uses cold atmospheric plasma and AI to perform real-time, non-destructive materials characterization. A Stanford Chemical Engineering graduate with a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, O'Leary spun SirenOpt out of his doctoral research with advisor Professor Ali Mesbah in 2022. The platform can generate 213,000 data points per measurement in milliseconds without destroying the sample, targeting battery manufacturing, aerospace, semiconductors, and other advanced manufacturing sectors. SirenOpt has raised $16.1M total, including a $6.5M strategic round led by Hitachi Ventures and JLR's InMotion Ventures in 2025, plus a $2.4M California Energy Commission BRIDGE grant for battery electrode applications.
Nadim Maluf
Nadim Maluf is the co-founder and CEO of Qnovo, a Silicon Valley battery intelligence software company whose technology has shipped inside over 150 million smartphones and is now entering the electric vehicle market. Holding a PhD from Stanford, an MS from Caltech, and over 50 patents, Maluf spent three decades mastering sensors, photonics, and MEMS before channeling everything into a singular bet: that software, not chemistry, would solve the world's battery problem. His platform, SpectralX, and its automotive extension SentinelX, use real-time electrochemical diagnostics and machine learning to make batteries charge faster, last longer, and fail less often — a proposition that earned strategic investment from Hyundai and Kia.