Inorganic cathode materials in current batteries cause major cost, emissions, and supply chain issues. Daqus Energy aims to commercialize organic batteries using transition metal-free cathodes sourced entirely from earth-abundant elements. Beyond the economic and environmental merits, organics deliver faster charging and higher capacity than inorganic incumbents.
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Harish Banda
Harish Banda is co-founder at Daqus Energy, a startup commercializing lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries with organic cathode materials. Banda conducted his Ph.D. studies at the University of Grenoble Alpes in France and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT from 2019 to 2022. At MIT, Banda developed fast-charging organic electrode materials for energy storage in collaboration with Lamborghini.
TECHNOLOGY
Critical Need
Today’s Li-on battery (which stores one kilowatt-hour of energy) requires 300 kilowatt-hours of energy, 100 kilograms of CO₂ emissions, and $150 to produce. Despite these costs, batteries are essential for electrifying the transportation sector and decarbonizing the grid. Lowering all three values simultaneously is critical for the rapid and sustainable adoption of battery technologies. Most issues related to cost, supply chains, and energy/carbon-intensive processing of batteries are tied to the inorganic materials used as cathodes. It is thus crucial to introduce new materials that comprehensively outperform current cathode materials.
Technology Vision
Daqus Energy aims to utilize organic materials that are derived entirely from the abundant elements carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen as transition metal-free cathode materials for Li-ion batteries. Switching to organic materials also delivers multiple advantages that are inherent to organic chemistry: precursor abundance, diversity, and tunable synthetic routes. Proprietary materials at Daqus deliver comprehensively better energy storage performance than cobalt-containing and cobalt-free incumbents, while offering economic and environmental advantages that are unique to organics. Organic batteries by Daqus Energy will also function as modular systems that are compatible with current and upcoming advances in silicon, lithium and sodium-ion chemistries.
Potential for Impact
Switching to organic cathode materials presents multiple advantages: precursor abundance, diversity, and tunable synthetic routes. Organic cathodes can serve as ideal battery materials by lowering costs and CO₂ emissions, and also facilitating the circumvention of geopolitical limitations and monopolies on current battery supply chains. These merits allow Daqus Energy to project substantially lower costs per kilowatt-hour for organic batteries over inorganic incumbents. This alone can catalyze equitable adoption of energy storage technologies in both developed and developing countries.