The sodium-ion battery startup Natron Energy stopped operating this week, bringing its ambitious plans to build the world’s first sodium-ion gigafactory to an abrupt close.
Since its launch in 2012, Natron has raised over $363 million, from investors including Khosla Ventures, Liberty Oilfield Services, and United Airlines. Just five months ago, in April, the company secured a $55.4 million top-up of its Series F raise.
However, in June The Information reported that recent investors had frozen scheduled payments to the company. Throughout the summer, the company explored fundraising options from both existing and potential new investors, according to a WARN notice submitted to the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity. These included a follow-on investment from existing stockholders, a Series B equity raise, a secured convertible note offering, and “a management-led proposal that contemplated substantial new capital and the purchase of certain existing equity interests.”
In late August, though, the company notified its board that these additional “efforts to raise sufficient new funding were unsuccessful.” The company closed its doors on Wednesday of this week.
As a result, 95 employees will be permanently laid off. The company will not be delivering on any current or future orders, chief commercial officer John Schmidt informed the company’s staff via internal memo, as reported by the North Carolina paper The News and Observer. Those booked orders total $25 million.
“This is not how we or anyone at Natron wanted this to end,” Schmidt wrote. “While a small team of Natron employees are being retained to shut down Natron in a safe and environmentally responsible manner, none of the commercial team will be retained.”
The company’s largest shareholder, financial consultant Sherwood Partners, plans to sell the company’s assets.
Just a year ago, the company announced plans to build a $1.4 billion factory in eastern North Carolina. The 1.2 million square-foot facility would have created 1,062 jobs and produced a whopping 24 gigawatts of sodium-ion batteries each year — a major potential foothold for the U.S. in the market.
This is on top of a smaller Michigan facility that was already in operation, with a capacity of roughly 600 megawatts per year.
A shift for sodium-ion
It’s an alarming turn for the sodium-ion battery, which has gotten hype as a potential challenger to the dominant lithium-ion chemistry. Sodium-ion has the advantages of using materials that are readily available in the U.S., simplifying supply chains. They’re also considered both cheaper and safer than lithium-ion batteries.
However, the market as a whole is still nascent. Almost all of the world’s sodium-ion manufacturing capacity (both current and planned) is in China; the first, the Fulin energy storage station, launched in May 2024.
But Natron was one of a group of U.S. startups making a bid to rival Chinese firms before they corner the market. Its peers Acculon Energy, Bedrock Materials, and Peak Energy have also been moving toward commercial production; Spencer Gore, CEO of Bedrock Materials, told Latitude Media last year that he expects to see production volumes “grow exponentially” in the near future — though for now China still has the upper hand.
Natron was at the front of the U.S. pack, as the first to open a commercial-scale sodium-ion battery manufacturing facility, in Holland, Michigan in spring 2024. With the demise of the company, that factory is closing, and 37 workers are losing their jobs.
It’s not just commercial problems that have plagued the sodium-ion battery sector, however. A Stanford study released in January highlighted concerns with the technology itself, including degradation problems that can compromise both cycle life and long-term performance.
For more on the market for sodium-ion batteries, listen to Adrian Yao, founder of Stanford’s STEER battery research program, speak with host Shayle Kann on the Catalyst podcast:
