Battery chemistry company Sila’s founder Gene Berdichevsky on the science of scaling up

Before Gene Berdichevsky became the co-founder and CEO of battery chemistry company Sila Nano, he was the seventh employee at Tesla Motors. As principal engineer on the Roadster battery, Berdichevsky was one of the first people crazy enough to experiment with shoving a lithium-ion battery pack into a combustion engine vehicle. The result? The Roadster became the first highway legal serial production all-electric car fueled by lithium-ion battery cells and able to travel over 200 miles per charge.

In 2011, Sila was founded with a mission of not only building the next generation of battery chemistry, but also being able to scale it. Since then, the company has figured out how to replace the graphite in the anode of a lithium-ion cell with silicon, which Berdichevsky says makes for a denser, cheaper battery cell.