The headwinds hitting the electric vehicle market may make it all the more difficult for startups in the sector to weather what’s known as the “death valley curve,” or the rocky period when a company has invested heavily in bringing a product to market but has yet to see any returns. For startups focusing on battery technologies, a new influx of federal funding may help alleviate some of the pain.

Last month, the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced $3 billion in grants to support the domestic battery industry. The funding comes from a program in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and is a piece of the $16 billion in investments in battery manufacturing and recycling the 2022 law made available through the DOE’s Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains.

The latest funding round will support 25 projects in 14 states that “will retrofit, expand, and build new domestic facilities for battery-grade processed critical minerals, battery components, battery manufacturing, and recycling,” per DOE.

The awards are a piece of the Biden administration’s efforts to bolster domestic manufacturing in the clean-energy sector as part of its climate agenda.

Among the recipients is Chicago-based startup NanoGraf, which won $60 million to support construction of a $175 million battery-material manufacturing facility in Flint, Michigan. The company touted the planned factory as one of the biggest silicon anode battery material plants in the world.

Tech Brew caught up with NanoGraf CEO Francis Wang about what the DOE grant will enable the company to do, its ambitions to enter the EV market, and why he believes the more than decade-old company has managed to avoid the death valley.

Keep reading here.—JG

The future of transportation is electric.

Despite some recent bumps in the road, that much is clear to Bob Holycross, Ford’s chief sustainability officer and a company veteran of more than 30 years.

Electrifying its global vehicle portfolio will play a key role in helping Ford achieve its goal of being carbon neutral across its vehicles, operations, and supply chain by 2050. With progress well underway in the first two areas, Holycross is focused on what he calls the “next big frontier”: decarbonizing the company’s supplier base.

“We’re into this phase of the journey where more of our electric vehicles are getting out there. We’ve done a lot of work on water, air, waste, and energy,” Holycross told Tech Brew during an interview at Ford’s headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan.

Keep reading here.—JG

OpenAI this month closed its latest eye-popping funding round—one of the largest ever private investments—at the same time as it reportedly further drifted from its nonprofit roots to full for-profit status.

To the Mozilla Foundation, OpenAI’s for-profit evolution is an example of how tech giants and big-money investors can overtake civic-minded mission statements and profit structures in the fast-paced AI arms race.

It’s part of the reason the nonprofit org is pushing a new vision for something it calls “Public AI,” a sphere of initiatives that would give more AI access to nonprofits, government entities, and companies with socially beneficial goals to complement the current commercial space.

Mozilla outlined this new strategy pillar in a report released last month, and it will frame many of the org’s initiatives and advocacy conversations going forward, according to Nik Marda, technical lead for AI governance at Mozilla.

“We’ve been looking at the AI space over the last few years, and seeing both this increased consolidation and closed-ness in the AI ecosystem, and at the same time, this nascent, emerging trend of what we call public AI initiatives, things like governments starting to help increase access to AI resources, and these nonprofit AI labs starting to build open-source AI components,” Marda told Tech Brew. “And so we see that emerging ecosystem as a basis for creating a meaningful public counterpoint to the private AI ecosystem.”

Keep reading here.—PK