Photo: General Motors
General Motors (GM) has announced that they will be investing $60 million in a Silicon Valley-based, AI-enabled battery materials innovator Mitra Chem.
The company’s AI-powered platform and development facility in Mountain View, California, will help to accelerate GM’s commercialisation of affordable electric vehicle (EV) batteries.
GM and Mitra Chem will develop advanced iron-based cathode active materials (CAM), like lithium manganese iron phosphate (LMFP), to power affordable EV batteries that are compatible with GM’s EV propulsion architecture, the Ultium Platform.
GM’s funding will help Mitra Chem to scale its current operations and to expedite their novel battery materials formulation to market.
Gil Golan, GM VP Technology Acceleration and Commercialisation, said:
“GM is accelerating larger investments in critical subdomains of battery technology, like cell chemistry, components and advanced cell production processes. Mitra Chem’s labs, methods and talent will fit well with our own R&D team’s work.”
An “atoms-to-tons acceleration platform” powers Mitra Chem’s lab, using simulations and physics-informed machine learning models to accommodate formulation discovery, cathode synthesis optimisation, cell-lifetime evaluation and process scale-up.
The in-house cloud platform automates data ingestion across diverse synthesis, material characterisation, cell prototyping, and standardised analyses and visualisations.
Mitra Chem CEO and Co-Founder, Vivas Kumar, said:
“GM’s investment in Mitra Chem will not only help us develop affordable battery chemistries for use in GM vehicles, but also will fuel our mission to develop, deploy and commercialize U.S. made, iron-based cathode materials that can power EVs, grid-scale electrified energy storage and beyond.”
