Black Magic Powder

The alchemists at Sila Nano have their eyes on a $31 billion—and growing— lithium-ion battery market. They just might get a nice piece of it.

- Alex Knapp

Sila Nanotechnologies has all the trappings of a typical Bay Area start-up: an open floor plan, conference rooms named for Atari games, healthy snacks in the kitchen. Two Portuguese water dogs, Ångström and Lumen, rule the boss’ office.

Walk through the entrance and open the door, however, and you won’t find racks of servers or a foosball table. Instead, you’ll see an industrial laboratory, complete with white-suited workers in a clean room. Two-liter furnaces are hooked up to gas lines, computers and chemistry instrumentation. Construction workers are tending a large, mysterious cylinder.

It’s all to perfect and then to commercialize a fine black powder in a glass jar resting in the hand of Gene Berdichevsky, 34, the company’s co-founder and chief executive. What, exactly, is this powder? That is a secret, although we can tell you that there is some silicon in it and that, if this substance does what it’s supposed to do, it will deliver a 40% boost to the energy performance of lithium-ion batteries.

“I think what Intel did for the semiconductor and personal computing industry in the ’90s is what we would want to enable in battery technologies,” Berdichevsky says grandly.

He has believers. Sila has raised more than $100 million from Samsung Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, In-Q-Tel and others. It is partnering with Hong Kong-based Amperex Technology to get its powder into cellphones and wearables like smartwatches as early as 2019. Sila also has a collaboration with BMW for potential use in its cars in the early 2020s.