Cheaper, lighter, and denser: the trifecta defines an ideal battery. No one has devised a perfect cell quite yet, but one stealthy startup thinks it has found a new material that solves at least two of those challenges.
Daqus Energy has been quietly operating for the past couple years, refining a compound known as TAQ that promises to be cheaper and lighter than competing battery materials.
“We have not seen a metric at which TAQ does poorly compared with the incumbents,” Harish Banda, co-founder and CEO of Daqus, told TechCrunch. The company was spun out of MIT, where research into the material was funded in part through a partnership with Lamborghini.
There are a few caveats, which Banda freely offers: The company is still scaling production of TAQ, and it has only just begun working on the type of cells that could drop into an EV. Plus, many promising battery materials have died on the path to commercialization.
But the upside is strong enough that Daqus is emerging from stealth with a $6 million seed round led by Morningside with participation from unnamed individual investors.
Daqus’s material replaces the cathode in a lithium-ion battery. In a typical cell, the cathode is made of nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) or iron-phosphate (better known as LFP). NMC cells are more expensive, but offer greater energy density and longer range in electric vehicles. LFP cells are cheaper but heavier.
U.S. and European automakers have favored NMC for their EVs, but they’ve begun to switch to LFP to cut costs. Problem is, the vast majority of LFP cathode materials are made in China, making them a nonstarter for U.S.-made EVs that want to qualify for tax credits.
The material Daqus has discovered, bis-tetraaminobenzoquinone or TAQ for short, isn’t made using expensive critical minerals like nickel or cobalt. Instead, it’s made entirely of widely available carbon-based compounds.
For the first step in the manufacturing process, the two molecules the company uses are already used to make dyes and fertilizers. “They are absolutely dirt cheap,” Banda said, noting that the company buys small batches at $1 per kilogram. “So you can only imagine what that means when you buy a ton of it.”
What’s more, the process used to synthesize a TAQ cathode uses vastly less energy. Making the stuff only requires heating it to 120 degrees C, some 700 to 800 degrees C lower than LFP or NMC cathodes, Banda said.
On the manufacturing line, TAQ can be deposited using existing equipment. But there’s another opportunity to cut costs: existing anode manufacturing equipment can also work with TAQ. That would allow battery makers to use water as a solvent instead of NMP, a toxic solvent that needs to be captured and recycled.
Altogether, TAQ’s qualities have left Banda feeling confident that the material can undercut the cheapest lithium-ion batteries on the market. “If somebody is saying that LFP batteries are at $50 per kilowatt hour, we would be cheaper than that for sure,” Banda said. “Exactly how much needs to be figured out.”
Daqus has been producing coin cells in its lab space in Massachusetts, and its internal tests have shown TAQ to be durable. TAQ-based batteries can be charged and discharged 2,000 times and maintain at least 80% of its original capacity, and they’re stable at high temperatures. Those small batteries also charge at a rate that, when extrapolated to EVs, would enable six minute fast charging.
If there’s a caveat, it’s that TAQ cathodes take up more space than NMC, though they’re competitive with LFP. Still, he points out that because the material is lighter, EVs designed around it could also be made lighter and would need fewer batteries overall. That could give TAQ-powered EVs enough range to compete with NMC while being cheaper and lighter.
Sports cars might realize the benefits sooner. Weight has been one of the biggest penalties of electrification: It’s incredibly easy to make an EV that’s lightning quick in a straight line, but making one that handles well on a race track? That’s proven to be harder. A lightweight, fast-charging battery pack could go a long way toward making electric sports cars feel special.
“Lots of car companies in the world are trying to make electric cars,” Banda said. “What’s the difference between a Rolls Royce versus a Tesla? Sure you have better seats, but in terms of the core of the car, it used to be the engine. Now, it seems to be the battery.”
