Battery cathode materials startup Nascent Materials: founded by a former Tesla Gigafactory engineer fixing the supply problem he saw from the inside.

Mike Norton and Jackson Lyons kick off Series 8 with Chaitanya Sharma, founder and CEO of Nascent Materials - a battery cathode materials startup based in Newark, New Jersey, that just closed its seed round.

Chaitanya's CV is unlike most founders in this space. He was one of the first engineers hired at Tesla's original Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada - the facility where the term Gigafactory was literally coined. From there: a stint at Lithium Americas working on novel lithium extraction from soil deposits in Nevada, then co-building Imperium 3 New York - a ground-up Gigafactory startup in upstate New York.

Every step pointed to the same problem: getting hold of consistently high-quality cathode materials is one of the hardest things a battery startup has to do. Nascent Materials exists to change that.

In this episode:

Why materials control ~80% of a battery cell's cost - and yet get a fraction of the attention
The brutal reality of scaling up from lab to production - why a process that works perfectly in a small container can fail completely in a larger one
Why the Western world can't simply copy the Chinese manufacturing model - the raw materials, labor structures, and government support systems are fundamentally different
How Nascent is designing cathode materials with the end-use case embedded from day one, drawing on Chaitanya's experience running factories that consume these materials
Closing a seed round in a tough investment climate - and why the technology spoke for itself
What it actually means to be a CEO: speaking every department's language and aligning your whole team behind the mission

If you work in battery manufacturing, materials supply chains, or you're building a deep tech startup and want a masterclass in thinking from the ground up - this is the episode.

Chaitanya Sharma | LinkedIn

(35) Nascent Materials: Overview | LinkedIn