Northvolt agrees to buy US battery start-up Cuberg

Swedish battery maker Northvolt has agreed to acquire Silicon Valley start-up Cuberg, which it says has developed technology that could lead to a significant increase in the range of electric vehicles.

Northvolt, which is building a giant battery “gigafactory” in northern Sweden, said Cuberg’s batteries would be deployed in electric aircraft within three years and in cars by 2025.

The move is the latest in a global race to develop more powerful lithium-ion batteries that promise faster charging and longer range, allowing electric vehicles to compete with their gasoline counterparts.

European carmakers hope a battery breakthrough can give them an edge over rivals such as Tesla and Chinese start-ups including Nio. China produces more than 70 per cent of the world’s lithium-ion batteries.

Peter Carlsson, the former Tesla employee who founded Northvolt in 2016, said Cuberg’s technology would allow the company to “make significant improvements in both performance and safety while driving down cost even further for next-generation battery cells”.

He added: “This is critical for accelerating the shift to fully electric vehicles and responding to the needs of the leading automotive companies within a relevant timeframe.”

Rival Silicon Valley start-up QuantumScape, which listed via a reverse merger last year, is also developing a lithium metal battery in partnership with Volkswagen.

The use of lithium metal in a battery is key to boosting its energy density, or the amount of energy a given volume can hold, but it has proved problematic to introduce because of the growth within the cells of lithium structures known as dendrites that can short circuit the system.

While QuantumScape and others use a solid electrolyte to get around this problem, Cuberg, which was spun out of Stanford University in 2015, said it used its own liquid electrolyte that had the “stability and performance of” solid state batteries.

Northvolt said the technology had been validated by third parties and targeted energy density of 1,000 Watt-hours a litre by 2025, from about 700 Wh/L in the most powerful batteries today.

Northvolt added that Cuberg had already demonstrated that its battery technology worked with existing lithium-ion manufacturing systems, making it easy to integrate with its factory in Skelleftea.

Alongside the deal, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, the company said it would establish an advanced technology centre in Silicon Valley to work on materials research and development of lithium-ion batteries.