Eight Years After the Collapse of Envia, Its Former CTO Has a New Battery
A supercautious Sujeet Kumar is attracting positive reviews for his silicon anode
In 2015, I published a book called The Powerhouse, which followed a group of researchers at Argonne National Laboratory as they attempted to create a super battery. Two members of this group had invented NMC, which later became the industry’s go-to battery chemistry, used by everyone except Tesla. Now, it was trying to move to NMC 2.0, a turbo-charged advance of the formulation.
But on the sidelines, a Silicon Valley startup called Envia Systems was racing to accomplish the same thing. Envia had licensed Argonne’s invention, and gotten GM intensely interested in its version of the chemistry. So interested that GM cut a deal to use Envia’s NMC 2.0 in its first new pure electric vehicle — the Chevy Bolt. It was a gargantuan vote of confidence in Envia, and stood to make its executives and investors wealthy. One of them was Envia’s chief technology officer, a friendly and soft-spoken materials scientist named Sujeet Kumar, whom I came to know over a two-year period of reporting.
Only, just months before the book was due, I learned something stunning — the assertions that Kumar and Envia had been making publicly and to GM about their…
