SUPERCHARGING INDIA'S EV POWER PLAY

EVs are booming, but battery reliability remains a bottleneck. One startup is rethinking how batteries are built to improve strength, consistency, and performance.

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As electric vehicles gathered momentum and the transition to clean energy accelerated, Priyadarshi Panda identified a critical inflection point. He recognised that battery manufacturing mirrors semiconductor production in its core challenges: process precision, consistency, and long-term reliability.

In 2022, Priyadarshi started International Battery Company (IBC) based in the heart of Silicon Valley in the US, which is the global innovation engine, with operations in South Korea and India. “In India, we operate through a majority ownership joint venture with Mahanagar Gas Limited, called IBC India Private Limited,” says Priyadarshi.

The company specialises in three main areas of lithium-ion battery technology. First, they focus on material innovation, developing new battery materials to improve performance and reliability. Second is battery design and device integration, which covers chemistry, electrochemistry, and the internal configurations, like jelly rolls, to meet the needs of applications ranging from telecom and solar grids to high-performance defence, AI data centres, and vehicles of all sizes. Third is product assembly, combining these devices or device-ready components into finished batteries, mostly in prismatic form, which accounts for 70-75% of lithium-ion deployments today and is expected to grow to > 80% by 2028.