GM Invests in Battery Materials Firm Mitra Chem

Ken Zino of AutoInformed.com on GM Invests in Battery Materials Firm Mitra Chem

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General Motors (NYSE: GM) said today in Detroit that it is leading a $60 million Series B financing round in Mitra Chem,* a Silicon Valley-based, AI-enabled battery materials innovator. The company’s AI-powered platform and advanced research and development facility in Mountain View, California, will be part of the commercialization of affordable electric vehicle batteries, GM claimed.

The companies will develop advanced iron-based cathode active materials (CAM), such as lithium manganese iron phosphate (LMFP), to power affordable and accessible EV batteries compatible with GM’s EV propulsion architecture,aka the Ultium Platform. GM’s funding will help Mitra Chem expand its current operations and to “expedite their novel battery materials formulation to market.”

“This is a strategic investment that will further help reinforce GM’s efforts in EV batteries, accelerate our work on affordable battery chemistries like LMFP and support our efforts to build a US.-focused battery supply chain,” said Gil Golan, GM vice president, Technology Acceleration and Commercialization.

Mitra Chem’s battery R&D facility can simulate, synthesize and evaluate thousands of cathode designs monthly, ranging in size from grams to kilograms. GM claimed these processes result in  shortened “learning cycles, enabling shorter time to market for new battery cell formulas.”

Mitra Chem’s lab, using simulations and what it calls “physics-informed machine learning models to accelerate formulation discovery, cathode synthesis optimization, cell-lifetime evaluation and process scale-up. The in-house cloud platform, purpose-built for battery cathode development, automates data ingestion across diverse synthesis, material characterization, cell prototyping, and standardized analyses and visualizations.”

*Mitra Chem

The firm says it is building the first North American lithium-ion battery materials product company that shortens the lab-to-production timeline by more than 90%. “Lithium-ion batteries are the key platform technology enabling electrification in transportation, consumer electronics, along with residential, commercial, and grid-scale energy storage.

“Mitra Chem’s first product category is iron-based cathodes for Western battery applications. Iron-based cathodes shift away from the use of elements such as nickel and cobalt, which are facing imminent supply crunches. Mitra Chem takes cathode products from lab to industrial scale faster than the competition by leveraging an in-house machine learning technology advantage to dramatically shorten the R&D timeline. The company’s goal is to transform the cathode from a specialty chemical to a platform technology that differentiates cell performance by end application,” Mitra Chem claimed.

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