OneD Battery Sciences, a battery tech company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, is preparing its Moses Lake operations after announcing a $25 million Series C round Thursday.
OneD co-founder and CEO Vincent Pluvinage said the company is retrofitting two 12,500-square-foot buildings it is leasing in Moses Lake. OneD is also shipping machinery from the East Coast to Moses Lake this month, Pluvinage said, and the company plans to hire about 20 people in the central Washington town to start.
"We'll be up and running sometime early next year," Pluvinage said. "We've been doing all the processing in Palo Alto, but the problem is we're running out of capacity because of our customers."
OneD, founded in 2013, adds silicon to anode battery cells with the aim of increasing energy density. The company says it does this by fusing silicon nanowires to the graphite found in batteries. Pluvinage said the company works with existing graphite suppliers, making the process easier for battery cell makers.
OneD has about 30 employees now and will likely double that number in Palo Alto, in addition to the 20 employees that will work in Moses Lake, Pluvinage said. The Moses Lake plants will serve as a qualifier plant to test production before putting new batteries out into the world, and OneD has another such plant outside the U.S., but Pluvinage declined to say where.
Moses Lake has become a hotbed for new battery technology, with well-funded companies like Alameda, California-based Sila and Woodinville-based Group14 both laying out plans to open manufacturing operations there in the coming years. Both companies make a silicon-based anode powder to replace the traditional graphite found in batteries, with the aim of making batteries smaller, cheaper and longer-lasting. Sila raised $590 million last year, while Group14 raised $400 million in May.
Moses Lake is also home to REC Silicon, a polysilicon producer for the solar industry that has a byproduct gas called silane, which is crucial to this new battery technology. REC, which also has a plant in Butte, Montana, closed its Moses Lake plant in 2019 due to the trade war with China. But in May REC announced it is reopening its Moses Lake plant after a major investment from South Korean manufacturing company Hanwha Corp. earlier this year. First production is slated for late 2023, and full production is slated for 2024.
Pluvinage said Moses Lake has clean, cheap electrical power and strong industrial talent. He also has known REC for years and would like to use them as a supplier for silane. REC in the past has said the company will need some convincing to start producing the amount of silane needed for the large-scale ambitions of these battery tech companies. Pluvinage said OneD's needs should be attractive to REC, but OneD can find a different supplier if needed.
Pluvinage said OneD doesn't need to raise the massive amounts of capital that Sila and Group14 have raised because the company doesn't have the same infrastructure costs, as OneD works with other manufactures and doesn't need to do the work in-house.
"Our competitors cannot do that because their (intellectual property) is not sufficient," Pluvinage said. "(Sila and Group14) can never touch the cost structure."
