- Our Next Energy is making batteries for electric vehicles.
- CEO Mujeeb Ijaz says its hybrid approach will allow for a 700-mile range.
- Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures led the startup’s $25 million Series A round.
Before Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a venture-capital fund founded by Bill Gates, was ready to invest in the battery startup Our Next Energy (ONE), it needed founder and CEO Mujeeb Ijaz to answer a critical question: How do we know your technology won’t become outdated?
ONE is far from the only company trying to make batteries safer and more energy-dense. Unlike some of its rivals, it isn’t pursuing the much-hyped but notoriously difficult to master solid-state chemistry that some have called the “holy grail” for batteries. Breakthrough had already invested in one of those competitors, QuantumScape, and, it appeared, wanted to make sure ONE’s approach wouldn’t make it obsolete.
Ijaz responded that there was more to his company than the formula behind its cells, he told Insider. ONE is also working on a new approach to EV batteries that it believes will allow for a driving range of 700 miles or more, around 200 miles more than the top range available today. And, he added, even if ONE’s competitors achieved a solid-state breakthrough, they would go through years of growing pains.
His pitch worked. Breakthrough led ONE’s $25 million Series A funding round, which closed in October.
“Months and months of due diligence went into working with them,” Ijaz said.
A new approach to increasing battery capacity
Ijaz has been working on batteries for three decades for companies including Ford and Apple. While at the latter, he longed to make a bigger impact on electric-vehicle adoption than was possible within the confines of a large corporation. Last year, he founded ONE with a goal of doubling the distance EVs can drive between charges.
ONE’s solution is the Gemini, a battery combines two chemistries: lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) cells that can power a vehicle for 150 miles, and a range extender that can refill the LFP cells enough times to give the entire system a capacity of 700 miles or more per charge. The range extender uses a chemistry that isn’t durable enough for long-term use by itself, but the LFP cells will provide enough juice that the average vehicle will rarely have to tap into the range-extender’s reserves, Ijaz said.
ONE is also making an LFP cell without the range extender, called Aries, that’s designed for commercial vehicles. LFP chemistry is safer, less expensive, and presents fewer supply-chain risks than cells that use nickel and cobalt, which are found in many of today’s EV batteries, Ijaz said. But LFP chemistry is also less energy-dense, a problem ONE solved by designing a battery pack that could fit more cells than competing packs. Ijaz said cells account for 76% of the volume of the Aries pack, compared to less than 50% of the packs used in the BMW i3 and Tesla Model 3, which ONE engineers tore apart and examined in the company’s lab.
ONE plans to begin manufacturing Aries packs (Ijaz said the company has a customer for the Aries that operates delivery trucks, but wouldn’t disclose the company’s name) next year and Gemini packs in 2025.
“The doubling of EV range is not being asked for” now, Ijaz said, but the next wave of EV buyers will be more demanding. “We’re trying to get ahead of that now.”
Are you a current or former Our Next Energy employee? Do you have a news tip or opinion you’d like to share? Contact this reporter at mmatousek@insider.com, on Signal at 646-768-4712, or via his encrypted email address mmatousek@protonmail.com.
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