Meet the Battery Startup Taking on China’s Giants

The field of lithium batteries is currently dominated by Chinese companies like BYD and CATL. Not only do they sell the majority of batteries that go into electric vehicles and energy storage projects worldwide, they’re also opening up new factories in your backyard. When companies outside China try to compete, like Europe’s Northvolt, they quickly realize how hard it is.

But there’s still hope for China’s rivals. If another company can crack the next generation of battery technology, it may still be able to take the lead. And the battery industry already has a consensus on what that technology might be: solid-state batteries.

Today, almost all batteries have liquid electrolytes that carry ions between the positive and negative sides. But the liquid can spill, vaporize, and even catch fire. So for decades, scientists have tried to replace it with a solid electrolyte that could make batteries safer, more powerful, and more resilient to cold temperatures.

Solid-state batteries have been created in labs, but they are expensive and difficult to manufacture at scale. Many companies are trying to find the right chemical composition that will make this technology commercially viable. That’s also the goal of Vincent Yang, founder and CEO of ProLogium, a Taiwanese company that claims it will start mass-producing solid-state batteries as soon as 2027.

I recently met Yang in New York City. (Despite having the same last name, there’s no relation.) With a doctor’s degree in material science and over 20 years of experience researching and making batteries, he’s seen it all. “I’ve made almost every kind of battery. You can call me a living fossil for some of the older technologies,” he says.

Until recently, ProLogium was one of the smaller players in the battery space. Then, at the start of this year, the company introduced its fourth-generation solid-state battery product that it claims will be cheap and easy to mass-produce. Now, ProLogium is expanding rapidly: In February, it broke ground on a gigafactory in Dunkirk, France, after receiving a €1.5 billion local government grant to produce solid-state batteries in Europe. In May, ProLogium announced a merger with TDAC, an American blank check company, to go public on the Nasdaq at a $3.8 billion valuation.

For researchers of solid-state batteries, the current moment feels ripe with opportunity. Sure, Chinese companies like CATL are also investing in solid-state battery research, and they have the benefit of having more resources and more clients. But the fact that solid-state batteries use very different materials and production methods means there’s a new playing field where upstarts have a chance to beat the establishment players. “We are racing with the greatest people in the world. But even for the largest companies in the world, this remains a technical challenge that’s difficult to solve,” Yang says. The competition provides pressure, but also an adrenaline rush.

ProLogium’s edge is that it doesn’t have a factory in China. In today’s geopolitics, dependence on Chinese technology is increasingly frowned upon. Yang says his company recently signed a deal with a state-backed utility infrastructure company in Asia, which specifically requested a battery supplier not from mainland China. “Almost every region [in the world] has its own protectionism. It has positive and negative outcomes, but I have to admit we can sometimes benefit from it,” he says.

When Protectionism Becomes an Opportunity

There are a lot of companies vying for solid-state battery dominance. In 2024, China formed the All-Solid-State Battery Collaborative Innovation Platform (CASIP), bringing together virtually every big-name battery manufacturer in the country. The move was a coordinated national push to consolidate resources and accelerate development. Asian conglomerates, like Toyota from Japan and Samsung from South Korea, are also leaders in the field. And then there are prominent American startups like QuantumScape and Solid Power.

“Solid-state batteries have less mature supply chains than conventional lithium-ion, which cuts both ways,” says Jiayan Shi, a battery researcher at BloombergNEF, “There is more opportunity for non-Chinese players to establish supply chains, but also more vulnerability to disruption of Chinese-controlled upstream materials, like graphite, rare earths, lithium.”

Seeing the important role that batteries will play in energy resilience and combating climate change, many countries have started introducing national-security-driven policies that push for locally produced batteries. The European Union’s Net-Zero Industry Act, which went into effect last year, aims to produce 40 percent of Europe’s battery demand locally by 2030.

It is in this climate that ProLogium received a generous incentive to open its first overseas gigafactory in France. Its latest-generation product could start mass production in France by late 2028, Yang says. After that, the company is open to manufacturing anywhere in the world and is already exploring opportunities in the US, according to its SEC filing in July.

More Than Just Cars

It makes sense that ProLogium’s first factory outside of Taiwan would be in France, because Europe is currently one of the largest markets for electric vehicles. EVs, in turn, are one of the largest use cases for solid-state batteries. Yang tells me that ProLogium has been working on putting its products in cars for a long time: It partnered with Chinese automakers Weltmeister and Enovate to introduce solid-state-battery-powered prototype cars back in 2018. But Yang says ProLogium’s involvement in these projects was not reported because Daimler (now Mercedes-Benz), one of the company’s major investors, preferred to keep the collaborations quiet.

There’s one problem with using solid-state batteries in cars: Since these batteries are still more expensive to manufacture and make up nearly half of the cost of an EV, they can significantly raise the price of the cars and make them less desirable to potential buyers.

That’s why Yang says the first major use case for solid-state batteries might not be in cars at all, but in robots or AI data centers. The industry largely agrees. “Battery contributes an important part of the cost of EVs, while other sectors may not. Solid-state batteries are expected to be initially applied in fields with lower cost sensitivity—including robots, wearable smart devices, aerospace equipment, and drones,” says Shi from BloombergNEF.

Robot manufacturers and data center operators will also likely appreciate how safe solid-state batteries are compared to traditional batteries. “If an EV encounters a battery problem, you can park it on the side of the road and leave the car burning; but where would you park it if it’s an electric aircraft?” Yang says. This is also an argument for why data centers should start using solid-state batteries as energy storage to smooth out peak electricity demand and prepare for blackout emergencies. In fact, Yang says VinFast, the Vietnamese EV maker that has invested in ProLogium since 2022, is now pivoting from using solid-state batteries in cars to using them in AI data centers.

In the near future, most of the solid-state batteries ProLogium makes could be used in these emerging products. But in the long run, especially when its European factory gets up and running, EV companies are still expected to be the major customer, Yang says. “In 2032, maybe 60 percent of the batteries will be used in cars, and 40 percent in emerging markets. But in terms of revenue, it could be the reverse, 40 percent from cars and 60 percent from emerging markets,” he says.

This is an edition of Zeyi Yangand Louise Matsakis’* Made in China newsletter*.

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