QuantumScape, the leading developer of next-generation solid-state batteries for electric vehicles, listed today on the NYSE. Congratulations to the founders — Jagdeep Singh, Tim Holme, Fritz Prinz — and the entire QuantumScape team for reaching this important milestone!
Lightspeed first got involved with the QuantumScape team 10 years ago when we invested in the Series A round. We were attracted to the company, a Stanford spin-out, because of the incredibly talented founding team and their mission to create safe, low-cost, high-capacity batteries for electric vehicles. At the time, Tesla had only shipped a total of 1500 Roadsters and just bought the Fremont facility from Toyota, and the Model S was still 2 years away.
In the early days, a very fond memory was having dinner with the QuantumScape team back in October 2010 at our home. Jeff Krupman, the famed “Pizza Hacker,” used his portable wood-fired oven on the back deck to sinter some delicious pizzas for us all. I remember Fritz and Tim engrossed in a discussion with Jeff about the granularity of the flour, hydration of the dough, design of the oven, and how all the variables affected the resultant pizza. Serious minds! As I would learn through QuantumScape, engineering solid-state batteries is similar to making great pizzas — it’s about iteratively combining the right ingredients in the right way and baking it in a furnace in a highly controlled manner to get exactly what you want.
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? QuantumScape’s underlying approach was to engineer new materials at a “quantum level” so they would exhibit special properties not otherwise possible — i.e. they had to make fundamental breakthroughs in material science. In the early days, it certainly felt like a science project. The road for QuantumScape was littered for many years with potentially show-stopping technical obstacles. But each time with their ingenuity, persistence, some risk-taking, and a modicum of luck, they surmounted each challenge one-by-one. At one juncture, they courageously abandoned their initial basic architecture, which resembled a capacitor, and switched to a completely different paradigm. I remember leaving board meetings over the years feeling how enormous the challenges were, yet deep down, a belief that this team would find a way. I told Jagdeep that, but he probably thought I was just trying to be encouraging. But I could see the determination and conviction in their eyes. They would not be deterred.
Indeed, after about eight years, they came up with a working recipe. And this recipe makes one heck of a battery — it’s almost double the energy capacity of existing Lithium-ion batteries used in EVs today (a quantum leap true to the company’s name), charges faster, and is innately safer (given its solid-state composition). In a word: REVOLUTIONARY. For more about the technology and what it means for EVs, see this presentation.
Along the way, they stayed in stealth mode. The battery industry is full of companies that have been long on promises and short on delivery. Despite their accomplishments in this venture and in prior lives, this team has always had a great deal of humility. It was only in Oct 2018, around the time the team had made some key breakthroughs, that the silence was broken by Volkswagen which issued a press release about their strategic partnership with the company.
Today is important because, with the closing of the merger with the Kensington SPAC and a PIPE, QuantumScape will be armed with over $1B in cash to commercialize the technology. The company will likely encounter further roadblocks as they pursue this goal. But I have deep conviction that this incredible team will break through and disrupt the world of electric vehicles and beyond. We at Lightspeed are in awe of their accomplishments and grateful to be part of their journey. This is certainly one of the companies that I’m most proud of being associated with in my 25 years as a VC — not just because of what they achieved, but also because of the brilliance of the people and the journey they boldy charted.
Peter Nieh is a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. His investments include Eightfold.ai in enterprise, Nest in consumer, and QuantumScape in hard tech. In his free time, Peter chases all things round and spinning like frisbees and pizzas.
Lightspeed is a multi-stage VC firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the enterprise, consumer and health sectors. Lightspeed has backed 400+ companies globally in the past two decades including Nutanix, AppDynamics, MuleSoft, Snap, Nest and QuantumScape.
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