Will the lithium-ion batterymaker be able to build its own Giga factories to power EVs?
Late last December, lithium-ion battery builder Boston-Power announced that it had received $290 million in "financial support" from Chinese government agencies in order to scale its battery factories. The company's CEO laid out a goal of "competing with Elon Musk" in the deployment of batteries for electric vehicles.
We spoke with CEO Sonny Wu over the holidays. Wu was a managing director at GSR Ventures and chairman of Boston-Power before he took over the CEO post from founding CEO Christina Lampe-Onnerud in 2012.
Considering the entire $290 million as a venture round (admittedly a stretch) would bring Boston-Power's funding total to more than $600 million since it was founded in 2005. Recent investors have included GSR Ventures, Foundation Asset Management and Oak Investment Partners. Investors in earlier rounds included Venrock, GGV Capital and Gabriel Venture Partners.
Boston-Power was founded and funded in the U.S. but has moved its manufacturing to China while keeping some R&D functions stateside. The firm currently has 50 employees in Boston and almost 500 in China.
The company claims that this latest funding event allows Boston-Power to grow its Liyang facility fivefold by 2016 and expand its Tianjin facility capacity to 4 gigawatt-hours by 2017, aiming to reach 8 gigawatt-hours by 2018. Clearly, capex costs for a battery factory in China are cheaper than building a factory in Reno, Nevada....MORE
