Inside Addionic's Quest To Remake Battery Technology

Amir Mizroch: Alright. let's just start with the basics. Name, rank, unit, you know, how drill. Just give us an introduction to yourself and then we'll go into the company.

Moshiel Biton: Hi Amir. Thank you very much for having me. My name is Moshiel I am the CEO and co-founder of Addionics background is material science, mostly semiconductor more than a decade ago. I moved to the battery space and gained a PhD at Imperial College London in the field of batteries, and this how I entered into the battery world.

Amir Mizroch: That's right. And we met about a decade ago you were describing to me then, right? It was like in 20 14, 20 15. You're describing to me this PhD that you were doing about trying to to extend battery life, make batteries more efficient, make them run longer And I remember nodding very politely and thinking to myself, this guy's really smart. Try and just, you know, stay with him to see how this develops. And lo and behold, 10 years later you're the CEO and founder of Addionics, which is a battery tech, company. Tell us just a little bit about the company. How many people were you situated, you know, the funding and products and all that?

Moshiel Biton: Sure. We are 90 Employee. mostly based in Tel Aviv in Israel, but we have also a team in California and Europe. In the uk we raised more than 80 million US dollars. Very good mix between strategic investors and financial investors. We have strategic investors like General Motors, Scania from Volkswagen Group Avery Dennison, Novelli, Nippon Magna world leading.

Amir Mizroch: Can you just tell me what is the difference between a strategic investor and a financial investor? You've mentioned a couple of auto companies now. Yeah. Just tell us what is a strategic investor?

Moshiel Biton: Yeah. So strategic investors. That is by the name. That's the definition of the investor. They're not looking for only financial returns. They're looking also for strategic value. Either it's going to improve their product. They're going to use the product, they're going to be a customers later on or going to use it in some form that they're going. It's going to bring them some strategic advantage. And some, competitive edge which is different from financial investors that are not looking to be a customer or to use the product by themselves, only looking to the increase of the shares to make sure that the return is going to be higher than their initial investment.

Amir Mizroch: Remember this is The Dejargonizer. We have to do these things. Okay let's go back to the company. It's it's 90 people, nine zero. Yeah.

Moshiel Biton: Yeah.

Amir Mizroch: You've raised $80 million some from strategic investors like car makers and then also from financial investors. can you just take us back to the core idea? Behind your work and the company?

Moshiel Biton: we're developing a smart 3D post current collector. A current collector. It's a component in every battery. You have current collector on the ano side. It's a copper foil, and you have current collector on the cut signs. It's aluminum foil Today this foil is a 2D and dense. I'd be surprised, but the component hasn't changed. The architecture of this component hasn't changed since the invention of the lithium battery, even Tesla using the same component that developed back then in the nineties. The concept is not new to move to smart 3D porous material. Even before lithium ion batteries, there were technologies like nickel metal, lighter. They used some porous metals with the move to lithium ion batteries which enable a revolution of being mobile. With have uh, our mobile phone laptops, electric vehicles one of the goal was to commoditize batteries to build millions of batteries, a day at competitive cost, and with any alternatives to the D 2D metal foil. It wasn't, I would say, applicable or attractive enough change that foil. The foil is good enough and there is reason to change, and all the alternative were off the shelf and not designed for batteries.

Amir Mizroch: Can I just pause you there? Can we take it up a few levels? You're talking about cathodes and lithium ion batteries and there's a lot of, there was a lot of technical stuff in there. Can we just take it up? 100,000 meters and I'm looking down at how things are powered. Batteries, right? Battery technology has been around what, how long? A hundred years, 80 years, 70 years.

Moshiel Biton: Few hundred years

Amir Mizroch: Few hundred years, batteries. These things power everything. Now that's mobile and not just mobile, right? I mean, you have also electricity and power. Everything's not, that's not plugged into an electrical outlet needs a battery. So a car electric bike I guess, ships, planes, everything. Those batteries have been made in the same way using the same technology, which is lithium, iron battery technology. And this is fine. This is great. Our world runs on this, but. It could be a lot more efficient. And this is our core idea is to change the world by enhancing battery technology. And then we'll go down into the technical stuff.

Moshiel Biton: So first maybe if you want me to explain what is a battery so battery, it's a closed system. That you don't need to opposite to engine, you don't need to fuel that system. The amount of energy that's stored in the system is limited. it's fixed and it's a rechargeable process. You can charge and then recharge the battery or operate your device once your battery, and you can refill it with electrons, but it's a closed system. It's not like an engine that you need to fuel it with gas or oil or other type of fuels. electrons move very fast. So it's very effective and efficient system. And then in terms of the efficiency of the system, it's very close to a perfect scenario. In real engine, you have lots of losses and in batteries you have less losses. There is no any mechanics that involve the process. So you have ions that move from one side, one electrode, To another electrode. There is positive and negative. There is a diffusion, so it's a spontaneous reaction moving from one side to another side. Once they move to another site, during discharge, for instance, they're releasing electrons. And these electrons, we can use them to operate a device and the other way we are pumping to the other side ions that actually bringing electrons in to the system so they can store more energy. And that's a rechargeable process going back and forth like a musical chairs

Amir Mizroch: is that just as a quick example, let's say an ambulance. So the ambulance has an engine but it also needs batteries inside where there's like a mobile ICU, there's all sorts of you know, there's all sorts of of medical devices. The heart thing right. So you, you also have an engine, you also have a battery, and the battery stuff is a closed system. Yeah,

Moshiel Biton: conventional vehicles with internal combustion engine, the batteries that are coupled with engine starter battery. You know, to start the car and also to operate some of the electricity not only in ambulance, but we also need to have air condition and other type of electric elements that require electricity. The engine can generate electricity, but you need a battery to apply The current in most of the vehicles. So traditionally the use of this type of battery, it's a lead acid battery, it's less expensive battery, it's very old tech. You don't need to have high energy battery. because you have the energy from the engine, from The gasoline. So you don't need that. But if you have electric engine, you need then electric batteries because you cannot run electric engine from using lead acid battery. You need high energy battery, you need to store high energy, you need to operate this battery for long cycles. So it's not, it's a reversible process and you need to drive your car for longer range and to charge it fast. 'cause people used to fuel their car. So the concept is if you can recharge, you charge your vehicle and at the same time that you charge your car or the same time you actually fuel with gas. So this is need to be like around five, 10 minutes. If you make it like few hours, it's not pleasant.

Amir Mizroch: You mentioned combustible engines and electric engines, and now I guess we're at a time in history where we're slowly or fast moving from combustible engines to electric engines but mostly in cars and in some areas, right? There's still a lot of places that are coming online just with combustion. So when you, when you get you know, investments from strategic investors, from big companies who might also be customers. What do they look for you to help them with, to become more of an electric car company or to get their batteries? Like what is the reason that, you know, they're coming to you instead of doing this in-house or in another company?

Moshiel Biton: most of the innovation in the battery space is through the chemistry of the battery. And the lithium-ion batteries is technology that for here to, to stay. It's not going to leave anytime soon. All the alternatives are not good enough to compete with lithium-ion batteries. So most of the effort is how to improve the existing technologies or how to make the lithium-ion batteries with higher energy that's going to last longer and it can charge 'em faster. And most of the focus was through the chemistry. And we propose a new approach to do it through the physics, through the architecture, and we took a component that was overlooked. Like most, 99% of all the batteries in the world produce with the same component. That hasn't changed. It's 2D metal foil. You have copper on the anode side and aluminum on the cathode side hasn't changed. And we focus only on that component. We're the only company in the world that doing both usually the current collector produced by legacy metal companies either doing aluminum foil or copper foil. There is no any combination, but we are looking at that problem from very holistic, I would say a view that at the end of the day, the battery is a closed system. If we're making the electrode with the porous 3D electrodes, you are going to enhance the performance, reduce cost, and that's the holy grail everyone want a cheaper battery that's going to give you better performance. So that's exactly what we're doing. We're improving the lifetime, we're reducing the trade-off between power to energy. And I'll explain what is trade off today. Either you are building high energy batteries or high power batteries. You cannot get both.

Amir Mizroch: Can you gimme an example of high energy? High power?

Moshiel Biton: Yeah. For instance, you're using power tool. You need high power. You don't need to, that. This is going to give you a pulses for to drill for minutes. You need those pulses for tens of seconds. It's enough, but you need very high power in order to penetrate the wall. For instance, doesn't need to last for 10 minutes. You do it like four pulses. whenever you need pulses. So you need high power whenever you need, to use the application for longer time, you need high energy. Most of the vehicles, they don't require high power. Most of the vehicles, of course, if you're using Formula One, you want high power. But if you have a family car, most important is the range anyway. Electric vehicles are very fast. And the road is shorter in order to get acceleration that you need to get high power. So the road is like too short to get, That type of

Amir Mizroch: you have to charge all the iPads and phones at the back also.

Moshiel Biton: But charging fast charging is also associated with high power high energy at like short time. And that's type of phenomena that's required high power. And this is of course against the need of high energy. And we've managed to reduce that trade off. you can look at that as a slice of bread you put peanut butter. And the peanut butter is the energy and the bread is just a parasite. Is there? It's a substrate. It's not contributing to the energy. It's a inactive component. While we're making this bread porous, fluffy, like English muffin, so the peanut butter can get also inside, so we can load, we can put more peanut butter. We're increasing the energy and at the same time we have more contact with the metal, so we can actually have higher power.

Amir Mizroch: I just want to try and understand, so if you have a pita with falafel and humus and tahina and all that stuff, and that stuff is porous, right? The tahina starts to come out of the pita and, lands on your hand and on the floor. And so does the material they're not holding it in, they stop becoming porous. Doesn't that leak the battery? Doesn't that like, cause you know,

Moshiel Biton: That was one of the biggest challenge to incorporate like porous 3D material in the battery manufacturing process because you actually coat the active material on top of the foil and with the foil is fully dense. You are not going to get any bleed through or. In our case, we designed the structure in a way that will prevent any bleed through. So we have zero bleed through, that's part of our ip. And some secret sources, how to create structures that prevent any bleed through, so you can use existing manufacturing process. That's one of the advantage of using our technology. You don't need to have new type of processes or new type of CapEx or equipment. It's a drop in, completely drop in. We're not

Amir Mizroch: to a car battery, for instance. You can what you need to open it up, insert your thing, close it up again. How does that work?

Moshiel Biton: so today when you manufacture the ba, the battery, you have a big jumbo roll of a foil. You unroll the foil and then you coat the active material. You put the peanut butter on the foil and then you need to dry it to put it inside a big furnace. And then you are doing calendaring. It's like, applying pressure to get the active material, the peanut butter thinner. and we to get better adhesion, so to increase the energy density the bonding to the metal.

Amir Mizroch: And Is that where the name Addionics comes from?

Moshiel Biton: no, actually Addionics is addition of ions. So more ions additive deposition from ion solution. The way that we produce our copper post current collector, we're using electro deposition process. We are taking a well known process. Which using low cost CapEx and instead of producing from this process a commodity because the copper fold is a commodity. And the 3D is very important for the fast charging. The high power and the porosity is important for the high energy. 'cause in the porous, we can load, put more material, and we have a very good flow of electrolytes through the all the layers so we're enhancing the flow of the electrolyte and reducing the resistance and with better conductivity. And this is important to have more robust cells to last

Amir Mizroch: yeah. I need to try and get my exploding head around this. There's a lot going on on the very basic level. What I hear you saying is the way batteries have been made for decades. in a certain way it's basically called the current collector, right? You have two poles positive and a negative. There's copper, electrons go from the one side to the other. And you either do height, energy, which is like a pulse, like a drill or sorry, high energy. No, that's high power. And then high energy is a longer lasting, and that's always been a trade off. You've come along and you've said we've found a way to bypass that trade off, And then bordering all of that and keeping all of that inside the system is I guess it's dense copper or Yep. Dense copper. And that keeps the system closed. Now a ionics comes along and says that dense copper, if we put a layer of foam on it I think, or we put a layer. So

Moshiel Biton: So instead of the dense copper, we're replacing that with our Porous 3D metal. And this is what our customers really like, so they can see us as a second source instead of the big roll of the DAM 2D metal fo that they're buying from legacy companies. They can use the same process with the same cell design, just replace one roll with our role, we're producing that in a roll to roll format, and then we can adjust into their coating lines with the same specification.

Amir Mizroch: I'm getting this, I'm really getting this the copper that you're replacing with your own what is it made of? I, is that going too much into ip or can you just basically

Moshiel Biton: Well, it's the same composition of the foil today. We're trying to have minimum change, but maximum impact. So it's the same metal composition, exact same with the same, I would say, purity with the same conductivity same mechanical properties. That's the idea to have at least parity of all the performance and only to change the architecture.

Amir Mizroch: And once the architecture is changed, all those elements and all those electrons and all of that stuff that's, you know, doing what is doing inside the system can seep in a little bit more, a little bit longer. And that then gives you longer battery life, more efficient battery life. 'cause it, it's able to do its thing longer.

Moshiel Biton: Correct. So the battery's more robust and that's a big surprise. It's an overlooked component. No one tried to replace that, or no one believed that. There is a big impact of that component. Managed to reduce the internal resistance inside the battery. And then the battery is more effective, lifetime, longer. We have better heat dissipation who are generated generating less heat in the battery, which is important for the lifetime and also able to do fast charging as well, which today when you do fast charging, you generate lots of heat, lots of resistance. And if we are re reducing that, so we allow us to do it in more extreme conditions. We're in a very unique position that we are attractive to the whole supply chain. We have strategic investors from all levels of the supply chain from the component manufacturers, from the machinery operators, from the tier one, from the end user as well, like the automakers that most of them not building batteries by themselves, but they're the end user and everyone wants to have some impact on the supply chain. Traditionally the automotive OEM didn't build anything apart from the engine but the battery is today engine. This is what give you the performance. This is also Associated with the cost. More than 40% of the cost of the car is the battery. So if you are a car maker, you don't want to lose all this power performance wise. And also in terms of cost. You don't want to lose all of that to battery maker. Tesla change all the concept how to think about electric vehicles. they own all the data of the batteries. At the beginning of electrification, automotive players didn't understand that they need to own the data that is important

Amir Mizroch: When you say owning the data, you mean the performance of the batteries over time and what does that tell them? Distance and Right.

Moshiel Biton: You can update the profile of charging every time. You can look at that as a software, that you can update the software. You can see the state of the battery, state of charge that's maybe more technical, but to understand what is the status of the battery, and then to change your protocols, how to charge it, for instance, in order to extend lifetime or to extend your range and how to do it so you can do it. Over the air. You can do it as a software, like you can think about iPhone, and this is what the Chinese are trying to do. They're trying you to use electric vehicle, like you're using a mobile phone, like a smartphone that you are replacing every few years and you can get updates of the software. So similar way you are gonna move to the.

Amir Mizroch: Right. we spoke about the technical stuff, the chemistry, the physics, and then, you know, this whole new way that you're changing the current collector. And then we almost just jumped right into the business side and the industry side and the Chinese and all that. I wanna just go back to that pivot point between the technology and the industry. You said that your batteries and the way they perform you know, has an impact. It reduces heat, it increases efficiency. Now are you able to give a indication like how much longer does the battery last or how much less heat, you know, what is that percentage of improvement? I guess per battery, and then I would like to kind of layer up, so let's say that then scales right to a lot of industries. What is then the impact on industries itself? A lot of these industries rely on batteries, right?

Moshiel Biton: It really depends on the system, on the chemistry that we're using. But I can give you some examples that we did with customers. So we took existing chemistry with their cell design and we've managed to extend the lifetime even up to like a hundred percent. And this is like significant. If we can double the lifetime, if with conventional I would say architecture, you get thousand cycle. And with Addionics it can get 2000 cycles. This is

Amir Mizroch: in my laptop for instance, the lifetime of the battery usually is, let's just say a thousand cycles. It's probably more, right? Maybe

Moshiel Biton: So it depends on the system, but in specific system, we can even up, like we say, double that In some other system we can increase it by 40, 50%,

Amir Mizroch: Wow. So a really kind of game changing increase. Like your your devices can last longer, your cars can drive further, whatever it is that you're using battery for

Moshiel Biton: especially, if we're using extreme cases or high energy chemistry, the design for extreme cases. So in this type of chemistries, you have a big, potential in terms of high energy. But then you have trade off.

Amir Mizroch: Can you gimme an example? Is that like a killer drone or something

Moshiel Biton: for instance, for drones or for hyper car that you need to have fast charging and you need to have high energy as well. And then you have the trade off, so very short cycle life in the battery. And then we can take this type of batteries and the improvement would be greater than Already optimized cells for long life batteries.

Amir Mizroch: So it used to be either high energy, low time, let's say a drone that does a lot of stuff can only be in the air a minimal amount of time. versus again, I made the mistake, high power is low time, high energy is longer time. Now you're saying you can have both.

Moshiel Biton: Correct.

Amir Mizroch: Wow.

Moshiel Biton: we've managed to get much lower degradation to get more capacity to access more capacity at high power and also to, to generate less temperature or less heat. And that's like exactly what we're saying about the trade off between power to energy. We took high energy cells, we did fast charging with existing conventional cells we managed to reduce the temperature by few degrees, which also

Amir Mizroch: That's also for cooling, right? 'cause you need a lot of cool, you need a lot of power for cooling.

Moshiel Biton: Yeah when I started the company I said like, everyone is trying to, solve the problem from the system level. You know, you are putting like a bandage on, on the issue, in the problem, on the pain. And we said why not to go deep and to solve it at the building blocks and the infrastructure inside, not on the system level. So you can put lots of cooling, lots of battery management system on the system level. But if you are going to solve it on the electrode level, so you'll see less, you have less need of all this solution and the system level.

Amir Mizroch: if we go back, you're basically saying that it depends on the deployment. You could, you know, increase the battery's performance in both power and energy reduce heat and charging time by, you know, a hundred percent, sometimes more, sometimes less. And so that can directly impact the business of your investors, of your clients. They can use this battery technology to cars that the batteries last longer or drive faster or all sorts of things. how much is that worth to them? Like how big is this battery tech and battery innovation industry like, really take it out, into kind of a global level.

Moshiel Biton: like, it's a huge market. Of course the automotive market is one of the biggest, but you have batteries everywhere. you have uh, energy storage robots, ai mobile devices and so on. So, the electrification revolution is happening. Yes. We were hoping that it'll accelerate faster and we'll see more adaption, but still there is a so it's a huge market and we have our financial model that. We believe, what is our value that we can bring? And we're talking about around 10% per kilowatt hour. a value that Addionics can bring.

Amir Mizroch: You can reduce the cost of the batteries by 10% and we're talking billions, trillions of batteries around the world,

Moshiel Biton: correct. Of course we have some blind spot that we don't know exactly. For instance, if you are extending the lifetime of the battery, what is the insurance policy that the auto maker is paying to make sure that there is no explosion? And if we're going to reduce the chances for explosion, of course, cost money, but not,

Amir Mizroch: I'm not sure I understood you. so there's a first order impact, which is extending battery life, making it cheaper, faster, charging use in, you know, harsher conditions. And that brings down the cost and that's already a huge thing. And then you're saying that could then have an a second order impact on on insurance, on

Moshiel Biton: on environment insurance brand Every company that we are meeting, they want to use our technology. They see the result, they see the material. We are building our next generations of technologies before even launching our first generation. We're moving very fast. That's the privilege of being a startup being able to move fast and always improve product. We understand that it'll be very difficult. Our vision is to implement those structures in every battery in the world. very difficult to do it alone and to do it fast. That's one of the reasons of bringing strategic from the supply chain we can see them as a scale up partner and we negotiate with few also to do the scale up. They have footprint all over the world. They're already familiar as supplier with automakers. And once we are going to give them the license to produce it at scale all over the world, the penetration of Addionics would be easier because. No one see a, startup as a tier one supplier, it's very difficult to do this like jump from innovation like a startup company to being a supply company. And we don't have this experience of building like facilities all, all around the world. So of course no one is going to volunteer to do the first small plant. Instead of us, we did it. And now we're in the stage of finding the partners that will do the scale up. And in that way we're reducing that mass production risk.

Amir Mizroch: I heard you say you have product market fit but is the greatest challenge then finding a product partner fit or like a company an OEM to go out and scale this in their own?

Moshiel Biton: So we have our strategic investors that already willing to be our scale up partners. And we're finalizing now like the agreements of doing that. The plan is like 2026. We still willing to produce it in-house with our capacity . We have like 0.5 gig at our capacity that we completed the build like few months back. we need also to scale up not only the capacity but also the dimension of the product. We started with doing that in a desktop machine. So, and then moved to roll and we managed to make the roll wider and wider.

Amir Mizroch: What's role to roll? Everyone says this role to roll, is that kind of just mass manufacturing or

Moshiel Biton: Correct. If you want to do mass production, you produce it in a roll to roll. It's mean that you have lines that can produce theoretically endless.

Amir Mizroch: it.

Moshiel Biton: And that's where we get like high throughput and also it's very cost effective process. Process. You know, one of my former like, professor PhD, she is like, Dean of engineering at Imperial told me that if you are not going to make batteries in a roll to roll format, probably it's not going to be any, it's not going to commercial if you're using other. Technologies that not going to use. 'cause at the end, batteries are commodity. And this is exactly what the Chinese are doing perfectly, high quality and mass production and manage to reduce the cost of the battery. LFP, it's $35 per kilowatt hour. It's insane.

Amir Mizroch: has that gone down from, sorry, 10 years? 10

Moshiel Biton: from $10,000 per kilowatt hour. So they managed to really make it cost effective and to reduce the cost dramatically. And it was against all the analysts that said, okay, it's going be around hundred around this years. And we managed to get,

Amir Mizroch: How are they doing that?

Moshiel Biton: first they are willing to lose money in order to take the market.

Amir Mizroch: subsidized industries

Moshiel Biton: And, killing competition by doing that. As I mentioned, even in the supply chain copper foil, they're selling copper foil in raw material prices. So there is no any way for them to get any profits. And every western companies that trying to compete it's not a fair competition. They're losing and more and more companies going to bankruptcy. for us it's opportunity because they understand they cannot compete with China, with commodity. The only way to compete, is with high value component with Technology innovation, and this is exactly what, where we are bringing, and this is also create opportunities because we can use that assets today that's going to bankruptcy and retrofit. When I explained about our process, , it's not completely different from the existing process of copper foil, but we are adding our technology on top of that to allow us to use the same local CapEx that today in the west it's like big elephant dead assets that everyone trying to understand what to do and we're like saving them in order to generate a competitive advantage and they'll be able to compete with the commodity

Amir Mizroch: It is amazing to me how many Israeli startups I meet that, have this kind of core ability in this time that we're at now to help the West compete with Asia. It's unbelievable whether it's in, in chip design, in battery tech in all sorts of things. and it sounds like you're in that space, and I cut you off earlier, but you started saying today our greatest challenge is, let's talk about that for a few minutes.

Moshiel Biton: Yeah. So we mentioned the scale up and the goal is not to do it by ourself. We're not alone to do it with scale up partners. Companies that already produce at scale. They have a worldwide footprint and already a supplier or I would say approved and created build supplier to the end users. So that's one challenge. The second one is the pricing. That's another big challenge, especially the big companies, the big OEMs. They'll try and they're trying to squeeze us down their procurement team, that all their job is to squeeze down their suppliers. And we need to justify our value. So we're doing the true test to building batteries together, showing them the value. And second thing, which is quite another like big challenge today. They're using this type of component, it's commodity. They are valued the pricing that per weight, and we're making like porous material we can make, reduce the amount of copper up to 50%.

Amir Mizroch: They charge for the battery per ton of copper

Moshiel Biton: Exactly. They buying the copper foil per weight ton kilogram, but we're making that porous so it's like shooting our leg if we're going to use the same metric.

Amir Mizroch: it's shooting more than your leg. It's shooting your your hip.

Moshiel Biton: we need to find a new metric. So we are, converting that to kilowatt hour energy of the value. But at the end of the day, they also want to see a price with some other metrics. So we are going to show them per meter. So this is more acceptable metric that they can

Amir Mizroch: per meter. of

Moshiel Biton: square meter?

Amir Mizroch: Square meter of just, of space of their battery.

Moshiel Biton: Yeah. Or the roll that they're buying. Like you can either say it's a weight, like one ton or the length is like 10 kilometers, for

Amir Mizroch: and so how does that benefit you? You mean you're still making the same length

Moshiel Biton: we can compare it in a way that will be beneficial for us and not for them. If we're going to compare it by weight, it's going to be beneficial for them because we're not getting any, cost on the value that we're bringing by, per meter. We can even say, you know, you can take 10 meter in this 10 meter, you can get more energy and compare it to 10 meter conventional, 10 meter. It'll be more costly, 10% more costly, and you get less performance benefit.

Amir Mizroch: If you can show them that you're reducing the cost of their overall product by 10%, then then you can say to them, well, you know, gimme 2% of that. Right? Is that not

Moshiel Biton: Exactly. So the idea is to get more than 2% and to increase our share in this split. But it depends. Like on the contract, depends on the clients.

Amir Mizroch: we're heading towards the end and I wanna just ask You, something. you mentioned a bit earlier that the electrification revolution is happening, but that you expected it to move faster. what, do you mean by that?

Moshiel Biton: Yes. So. electrification, mainly in electric vehicles. The hope that will see more aggressive penetration of electric vehicles to the market. Maybe in Israel we don't see that. We see many Chinese brands, but for instance, in the US we don't have any Chinese brand. traditional automakers, they're building many type of models, but all their announcement of being completely zero emission and generate or producing only electric vehicles, they're postponing that. So if they Here's the continuation of the clean transcript:

say like 20 30, now they push that So they still understand, and I think that's what. We see that electric vehicles are expensive for them. They cannot really compete with China on the cost of the electric vehicles and the profit they're making profit mostly from the conventional internal combustion engine and so they still wants to be attractive to the shareholders. there is also the threat from Chinese, from BYD, from Tesla that are a hundred percent electric. So they need to balance between the tension of making profit like short term and also think long term how to catch up with the leading companies in the world. Because eventually I believe we'll see electrification and when we have infrastructure still, like you don't have enough infrastructure like all the second market, electric vehicles. Is not completely solved. We see like more electric vehicles on the road, but not with the same volume that we're

Amir Mizroch: Right. But beyond electric vehicles, I mean, I see that electric vehicles is a big part of the electrification revolution. Beyond electric vehicles there's phones, there's laptops, electric bikes, scooters, watches, Is that happening faster or you able to make an impact there or make any inroads?

Moshiel Biton: Yeah. So. the pain in that market is not as big as in other application. Technologies today can provide good enough like batteries for mobile phone, for watches, for others. That mostly in like, all the air taxi drones, robots, today one of the the biggest challenge of robots is not the brain. They all have an artificial intelligence that can operate almost like a human but you need to wire them or they cannot like last more than 20 minutes.

Amir Mizroch: The robotics there's robot arms in factories, but now you have the humanoid robots Optimus And

Moshiel Biton: the biggest challenge is The energy, The battery.

Amir Mizroch: So that sounds like a good market.

Moshiel Biton: Yeah. But it's not as big, not mature yet. But definitely there are other markets but you know, as a startup, you need to be focused. because if you're going to other markets you have different sales cycle, different like end user. So everything is different and you need to have people in your company that will be able to Operate in that environment.

Amir Mizroch: to, sum up innovation in energy, innovation in battery technology it seems like once you've solved the scientific and engineering part, which is very hard, you now have to really solve the scale and the business and the industrial side. And that's. Your big challenge. So what's your plan really to, you know, is that through your investors? is that through partnerships? what's kind of the overall strategy?

Moshiel Biton: we want to continue to be a technology company to generate like a next generations of product. And it's not a static technology, it's very dynamic. Always we're thinking about the next generations and now we're going to be relevant with the technologies in the future. To be agile, to answer. the industry changes and trends. We're not changing or disrupting the old market in terms, we're not replacing infrastructure. We're not replacing the basic concept of a battery. It's the same battery, it's the same infrastructure, same players in the supply chain. But the philosophy to make small change, but a huge impact, especially in this very conservative and tradition industry, if you are going to make a big impact, infrastructure, et cetera. No one wants to volunteer to adopt this type of change. No one. Wants to actually push for that change. That market is very conservative. think about it, you are a battery company. You need to build millions of batteries for instance, for electric vehicles. And you don't want to have any explosion. It's like a fatal accident like a recall and can destroy companies. And if you all need to decide about what technologies to use, you want a zero interruption, you don't want to change. You are, this is the way you design as an engineer, as a scientist to have minimum change. So we're trying to understand that philosophy, that brain of the engineers in the production line and to tell him like it's a second supplier can always go back. You can always see that it's fit into your existing technologies. It's a format agnostic. Doesn't matter which type of fat battery format doesn't matter. Each type of process that you're using, we're going to be applicable, and our philosophy is to build a technology or product that will be exactly suitable for the battery technology in the market.

Amir Mizroch: Yeah. I'll put in the show notes a link to Addionics blog, which I actually find you know, accessible. It's really great. I mean, you do talk about, you know, energy innovations also in defense electric vehicles and, with some more technical stuff, which is great. did I miss anything? Is there anything you feel like we've missed, we haven't touched, or you think we told the whole story?

Moshiel Biton: Yeah. I think the fact that we are chemistry agnostic, process agnostic. There are different type of process, weight process, dry process, many parts and many trends, different chemistries, silicone and solid state. In the beginning it was very difficult to convince companies that we're a platform. We're not trying to build like specific battery. We're not a battery company. It's a platform. We bet on the battery race. This is the only thing that you need to believe if the battery race is going to continue and we're not betting on a specific horse, that's the message, like the battery race,

Amir Mizroch: that was the framing that I was looking for at the beginning is there is a battery race, right? There's a battery race in electric vehicles and even in combustion vehicles, there's a battery race in planes. There's a battery race in all our devices. It's to get more. Out of the battery, more power, more energy cheaper, less heat. and that battery race is worth a huge amount of value to all the brands and the big, companies. and Addionics is, doing research and production into not the layer outside and the management of the battery, but the actual chemistry of the battery and the actual physics of the battery. And there, how much do you will end off with this? How much more is there to discover in that race from a, you know, a scientific, engineering

Moshiel Biton: it's not a secret, but batteries are as we mentioned around for many years. So it's not a new concept. thanks to Tesla we see more and more innovation and more young talent join into that space. It wasn't sexy like 20 years ago. And there is no any success stories or, no, I would say example, it was considered like boring industry. And today we see more and more talents and innovation around that. I still believe like there are many technologies that are beyond lithium battery, but I still believe there are, like lithium batteries are here to stay for another decade for sure and be the major. player in that ecosystem. So if you want to build in in the near term, you need to focus on the lithium ion technologies. We understand that from the chemistry you already squeeze everything on the cell level, the electrode level. So that was a room to take. The other components that overlooked and the inactive component separator, binder electrolyte and current collector, and the current collector among all the inactive component was like the most overlooked one. So we took like the kid in the class that no one wants to play with, no one wants to dance with. Even the teacher said that there is no any potential for this kid and we actually prove it wrong. That's what we're doing. Taking that kid and now this kid is super popular

Amir Mizroch: were you that kid? No, you don't have to answer that. Okay. Listen, I I mean, I got it. I'm pretty sure a lot of my audience will get it. This has been fantastic. I really got the whole battery race and the science and the chemistry and why this matters and the business. I'm gonna just say thank you. finally managed to get you on the show Moshiel Biton, CEO, co-founder, Addionics thanks again.

Moshiel Biton: Thank you very much for having me. it was a great pleasure.

Amir Mizroch: Amazing, great conversation.