One focus of Tranquillion’s venture investments is pathways enabling 800+Wh/kg battery densities. These levels enable electric aviation, maritime electrification, and transformational automotive and long-duration grid storage, all necessary to achieve step change decarbonization. Tranquillion is proud to invest in Ouros’ Series A to enable this goal.
The history of battery technology is patient compounding through successively more demanding markets. Lithium-ion first earned its footing in consumer electronics. Those early markets were forgiving enough to absorb early imperfection despite small volumes, premium pricing, and modest cycle requirements. Revenue — with support from publicly funded research — enabled the engineering improvements that eventually made the chemistry viable for automotive and grid-scale applications. That transition took decades of accumulated scale, supply chain investment, and manufacturing learning. We believe the next generation of battery chemistry will follow this arc.
Many recent next-generation battery companies have died trying to establish automotive and grid-scale as their beachhead. These are demanding markets requiring 1,000 – 5,000+ cycles, extreme cost discipline, and long qualification timelines against requirements their technology cannot yet meet. The right beachhead, just like the early days of the battery, is currently niche markets where current performance is already sufficient or not as demanding, and pricing power is relatively high. Each step unlocks a larger market as cycle life increases and cost declines.
Ouros’ initial market is drones — an application that demands maximum gravimetric energy density, domestic sourcing requirements, tolerates premium pricing, and requires only 50 – 200 cycles. Ouros already delivers profitable cell test batches to customers such as Seneca, building fire-suppression drone systems. Relative to peers, on a small amount of total capital, Ouros achieved revenue within three years, and has assembled a pedigreed team.
Mainstream commercial lithium-ion cells today operate at 200 – 300 Wh/kg at the cell level, with the frontier approaching 350 – 400 Wh/kg using advanced silicon-carbon anodes. Industry roadmaps put the practical ceiling of conventional Li-ion chemistry at 400 – 500 Wh/kg. Many theoretically optimal new chemistries exist: sodium-ion, lithium-sulfur, solid-state with lithium-metal. But supply chains, once established, are extraordinarily difficult to dislodge. The companies best positioned to reach those densities at competitive cost stand to benefit from capturing the incumbent supply chain advantage around Lithium while pushing the chemistry forward.
Ouros is building a lithium-oxygen battery that keeps oxygen locked in solid phase inside the cell, eliminating the gas-handling failures that have stalled Li-air development for decades. Further, Ouros has developed its own cathode and anode chemistries: On the cathode, Ouros is eliminating costly transition metals like nickel, manganese and cobalt. On the anode, Ouros is developing a silicon-based anode using a process that sidesteps costly chemical vapor deposition of silane.
We are proud to invest in Ouros and their world-class team led by founder/CEO Ethan Loosbrock, in their domestic manufacturing scale-up and pursuit of 800+ Wh/kg batteries.
