Date: May 13, 2008 Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
A Madison start-up has pulled in $500,000 of funding to develop an electrolyte that a group of high-level scientists thinks will make batteries and other storage devices much more efficient and safer.
Silatronix LLC raised the money in March from Venture Investors and will receive another $500,000 if it meets certain milestones, said Winslow Sargeant, a managing director at Venture Investors.
Silatronix is the first company created under a program Venture Investors started last year when it raised a $117 million fund. The fund will invest as much as 5% of its capital in the Venture Igniter program, which aims to pull untapped technologies out of the university and build companies around them, said Scott Button, a Venture Investors managing director.
"Silatronix is a bit unique in that it had all sorts of false starts and problems tangled up in the intellectual property - it was much more complex than we envisioned - but we felt the technical founders are some of the best in the world and the market opportunity is large," Button said.
The company is based on technology developed by chemists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill., and Quallion LLC, a Palo Alto, Calif., battery maker that won a Frost & Sullivan award last year for a lightweight, safe, and long-life implantable lithium ion battery it developed with researchers from UW-Madison and Argonne.
Silatronix envisions itself as a chemical company that produces electrolytes made with organosilicon compounds - materials containing carbon-silicon bonds. It would market its electrolytes to battery makers, like Rayovac, and companies involved in making specialized batteries, like Johnson Controls, to help make their batteries and capacitors more efficient and environmentally friendly, Silatronix Chief Executive Mark Zager said.
The electrolytes, for example, could make it feasible for hybrid cars to use lithium-ion batteries or capacitors, which would be much lighter than the lead acid batteries now in use and could greatly extend the number of miles the vehicle could travel on electric power, said Robert Hamers, a UW-Madison chemistry professor and co-founder of Silatronix.
And unlike existing compounds used in lithium-ion batteries and other storage devices, Silatronix's electrolyte is non-toxic and non-flammable, Sargeant said.
"These are huge characteristics nowadays, especially with the explosions of laptops and other battery-driven devices," he said. A number of companies, including laptop makers Dell Inc. and Toshiba Corp., have had to recall products in recent years because of exploding lithium-ion batteries.
Sargeant said Venture Investors recruited Zager, who previously ran RockBats LLC, a maker of a maple baseball bat developed with technology from the Forest Products Lab in Madison, and Alfalight Inc., a Madison maker of high-power diode lasers for industrial and military applications.
"We have outstanding chemists and outstanding chemistry," Zager said, "so that's the starting point."
Zager said he is working on validating the young company's technology and forging an intellectual property agreement with Argonne, UW-Madison and Quallion. Zager is talking with companies internationally about Silatronix's technology and test results.
"The real test is when it comes time for the manufacturing and procurement folks to talk with us about us becoming a supplier," Zager said.
Other scientists have evaluated the use of organosilicon electrolytes for lithium-ion batteries, Zager said, but only retired UW-Madison chemistry professor Robert West was successful. West, a Silatronix co-founder who leads the privately funded Organosilicon Research Group at UW-Madison, tested more than 200 compounds to find the right ones, Zager said.
Hamers performed the measurements necessary to build electrical connections in the electrolyte. Khalil Amine, an Argonne researcher, led the team that did the system design and testing for the battery Quallion brought to market.
Some of the biggest mistakes with start-ups occur very early in their lives, said Craig Heim, licensing manager for start-up companies at the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, UW-Madison's technology transfer arm.
It's rare that a company as young as Silatronix gets the opportunity to validate its technology with venture capital funding, Heim said. He hopes Venture Investor's involvement will make a difference.
"They have the experienced team to prevent some of those problems from taking hold, and they've recruited the right people and structured the company so, hopefully, we won't see those early problems that delay start-up companies," Heim said.
