General Motors has invested US$60m in Mitra Chem, a battery materials specialist that is using AI technology to lead its research and development. The partnership will be beneficial for both parties; GM will use Mitra Chem’s AI-powered platform and R&D facility in Mountain View, California, while Mitra Chem will invest the funding to scale its operations and speed up the advancement of novel battery materials and take them into commercialization.
More specifically, as part of the partnership, Mitra Chem will explore iron-based cathode active materials, such as lithium manganese iron phosphate (LMFP), for batteries compatible with GM’s Ultium EV architecture.
“This is a strategic investment that will further help reinforce GM’s efforts in EV batteries, accelerate our work on affordable battery chemistries like LMFP and support our efforts to build a US-focused battery supply chain,” said Gil Golan, GM vice president, technology acceleration and commercialization.
“GM is accelerating larger investments in critical subdomains of battery technology, like cell chemistry, components and advanced cell production processes. Mitra Chem’s labs, methods and talent will fit well with our own R&D team’s work.”
All the very best battery research, development and testing technologies are available at Mitra Chem’s battery tech hub. That includes capabilities and equipment for simulating, synthesizing and testing thousands of cathode designs monthly, ranging in size from grams to kilograms. This will ultimately lead to much shorter learning cycles, enabling a quicker time to market for new battery cell formulas.
Powering Mitra Chem’s lab is an atoms-to-tons acceleration platform, using simulations and physics-informed machine learning models to accelerate formulation discovery, cathode synthesis optimization, cell-lifetime evaluation and process scale-up. The in-house cloud platform, purpose-built for battery cathode development, automates data ingestion across diverse synthesis, material characterization, cell prototyping, and standardized analyses and visualizations.
“GM’s investment in Mitra Chem will not only help us develop affordable battery chemistries for use in GM vehicles, but also will fuel our mission to develop, deploy and commercialize US-made, iron-based cathode materials that can power EVs, grid-scale electrified energy storage and beyond,” said Mitra Chem CEO and co-founder Vivas Kumar.
