Start-up Adden Energy Develops EV Battery that Charges in 3 Minutes, Lasts 20 Years

Start-up Adden Energy has innovated a battery for electric cars that promises to achieve full charging in three minutes and also lasts two decades. The start-up announced that it has received the grant of an exclusive technology license by Harvard University’s Office of Technology Development (OTD) and a seed round financing of $5.15 million. Adden is founded by Harvard University scientists which is developing innovative solid-state battery systems for use in future electric vehicles that would fully charge in minutes. Primavera Capital Group led Adden Energy’s seed round.

Developed by researchers in the lab of Xin Li of Materials Science at Harvard, the lab-scale coin-cell prototype has achieved battery charge rates as fast as three minutes with over 10,000 cycles in a lifetime. It also boasts of high energy density and a level of material stability that overcomes the safety challenges posed by some other lithium batteries.

The license and the venture funding will enable the startup to scale Harvard’s laboratory prototype toward commercial deployment of a solid-state lithium-metal battery that may provides reliable and fast charging for future EVs to help bring them into the mass market.

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Adden Energy was co-founded in 2021 by Xin Li, William Fitzhugh, Luhan Ye and Fred Hu.

The Novel Technology

The start-up aims to scale the battery up to a palm-sized pouch cell, and then upward toward a full-scale vehicle battery in the next three to five years. Xin Li, Scientific Advisor to Adden Energy, said, “We have achieved in the lab 5,000 to 10,000 charge cycles in a battery’s lifetime, compared with 2,000 to 3,000 charging cycles for even the best in class now, and we don’t see any fundamental limit to scaling up our battery technology. That could be a game changer.”

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William Fitzhugh, CEO of Adden Energy, noted that 37% of Americans don’t have garages at home, so at-home overnight charging is not possible. “In order to electrify this segment, EVs need to recharge at comparable times to internal combustion vehicles, essentially in the time you’d currently spend at the gas pump,” he said.

Luhan Ye, CTO, Adden Energy, said, “Typically, lithium-metal anodes in other solid-state designs develop dendrites, twig-like growths that can gradually penetrate through the electrolyte to the cathode. We defeat the growth of dendrites before they can cause damage, by novel structural and material designs. As a result, the device can sustain its high performance over a long lifetime. Our recent study shows that this nice feature can also be maintained at scale-up.”