Battery Business

Written By Battery Burn Book

Battery stocks are a terrible way to understand batteries.

They’re also a very good way to see where the hype is going, where the fear is setting in, and which part of the industry the market has decided to misunderstand this week.

Every Wednesday, I’m tracking 8 public names that together give a decent read on the battery ecosystem: who supplies it, who’s trying to improve it, and who’s trying to make money deploying it. The point is not to pretend the stock market understands battery technology. The point is to watch what it rewards anyway.

This page tells you who’s on the list and why.

What I’ll Track Each Week

Each week, we’ll track three things: where these stocks closed on Tuesday, how they moved over the last week, and how they’ve performed year to date.

Think of it as a battery-sector pulse check, not a stock-picking exercise. We’re using the market as a signal, not as a substitute for understanding the underlying technology, manufacturing risk, or execution reality.

Not investment advice. Obviously. Just the names worth watching if you care where battery money and attention are going.

Materials & Recycling

Every battery cell depends on lithium, and that lithium either comes out of the ground or out of a dead battery. These two companies are the cleanest US-listed plays on each end of that loop: Albemarle on primary supply, ABAT on recycling.

ALB: Albemarle

One-liner: The biggest name in lithium. Founded / HQ: 1887 (modern form 1994). Charlotte, NC. Went public: NYSE, 1994 (spun out of Ethyl Corporation).

Albemarle is the largest US-listed lithium producer and one of the top three globally. It mines and refines lithium: mostly lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate, the forms used in EV batteries, at operations in Nevada (Silver Peak, still the only active US lithium mine and recently approved for expansion), Chile (Salar de Atacama), and Australia (Greenbushes, through Talison Lithium, a JV with Tianqi Lithium and IGO). The stock trades largely on lithium prices, which have been volatile as Chinese oversupply collided with weaker-than-expected EV demand. Albemarle has been cutting aggressively on the Western refining side: idling its Kemerton hydroxide plant in Western Australia in February 2026 after a $1.3B impairment the year prior. On the US side, the direction has reversed: its Kings Mountain, NC lithium project cleared FAST-41 federal permitting in March 2026, with the Department of Energy as lead agency. This is the 12th mining-related project and the first North Carolina project to clear FAST-41, a 2015 statutory program that the Trump administration has prioritized for critical-minerals projects. Of the names on this list, ALB is the one closest to a pure lithium-price proxy.

ABAT: American Battery Technology Company

One-liner: US battery recycling. Founded / HQ: incorporated 2011 as Oroplata Resources; pivoted to battery materials in 2019 (renamed American Battery Metals Corporation), then renamed American Battery Technology Company in August 2021. Reno, NV. Went public: traded as ABML (under both the ABMC and, from August 2021, ABTC names); uplisted to NASDAQ as ABAT on September 21, 2023 (after a 1-for-15 reverse split).

ABTC runs two parallel businesses: a lithium-ion battery recycling facility  at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center in McCarran, NV (20,000 MT/year design capacity, demonstrated >115% of design rate), and a planned primary lithium operation turning Nevada claystone into battery-grade lithium hydroxide near Tonopah, originally backed by a $57.7M DOE grant that DOE terminated on October 15, 2025, leaving a ~$52M funding gap, though the upstream resource remains a FAST-41 Transparency Priority Project. 

CEO Ryan Melsert was a founding engineer on Tesla's Gigafactory 1 before leading upstream-materials R&D at Tesla. With Li-Cycle's August 2025 bankruptcy sale to Glencore, ABTC became one of the few pure-play US battery recyclers still publicly traded: a position reinforced when the EPA selected it in November 2025 to recycle ~100,000 damaged modules from the Moss Landing BESS fire, a ~$30M project.

In the quarter ending Dec 31, 2025 revenue grew more than 1,300% YoY (more than the prior four quarters combined) and the company ended calendar 2025 with no debt. It remains small cap and speculative and the stock moves sharply on contract wins, grant updates, and equity raises.

Battery Tech & Cells

These companies are trying to build a better cell: higher energy density, faster charging, safer, or cheaper. Most are pre-revenue or early-commercial, so the stocks trade on technology milestones and OEM partnerships more than near-term earnings. Is it weird to have a publicly traded company without a commercial product? Apparently not in the battery industry.

QS: QuantumScape

One-liner: The solid-state flagship. Founded / HQ: 2010 (Stanford spinout). San Jose, CA. Went public: SPAC with Kensington Capital Acquisition, November 2020: originally NYSE, transferred to Nasdaq December 23, 2025.

QuantumScape is developing lithium-metal, anode-free cells using a proprietary ceramic solid electrolyte; a design that, at scale, promises meaningfully higher energy density, faster charging, and better safety than today's lithium-ion cells. Volkswagen has been a major investor and development partner for over a decade. In July 2024, the two signed a licensing deal giving VW's battery subsidiary PowerCo the non-exclusive rights to industrialize QS cells: up to 40 GWh/year, expandable to 80 GWh, with an additional 5 GWh option added in mid-2025. QuantumScape began shipping B1 samples in late 2025, signed a second OEM JDA, and ran a live Ducati V21L motorcycle demo at IAA Munich in September 2025: the first public demo of an anode-free solid-state cell in a vehicle. The company remains pre-revenue. A typical QS earnings call still reads more like an engineering update than a financial report.

FAC: Factorial Energy

One-liner: The solid-state battery company with real automaker miles, defense money, and a fresh Nasdaq ticker. Founded / HQ: Heritage company (Lionano) founded 2013 out of Cornell; Factorial spun out in 2019 and emerged from stealth as Factorial Energy in 2021. Billerica, MA (formerly Woburn). Went public: SPAC with Cartesian Growth Corporation III; began trading on Nasdaq as FAC on June 8, 2026, at a ~$1.3B implied equity value with $100M+ in gross proceeds.

Factorial develops solid-state batteries on two platforms: FEST (a quasi-solid electrolyte paired with a lithium-metal anode, the more mature line) and Solstice (an all-solid-state sulfide design unveiled in September 2024 with Mercedes-Benz as lead partner). Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, Hyundai, and Kia have all invested and signed joint development agreements, with Stellantis putting in $75 million back in 2021. 

Mercedes integrated FEST cells into a lightly modified EQS (its flagship electric sedan) and drove it 1,205 km (749 miles) from Stuttgart to Malmö on a single charge in September 2025, and Stellantis lab-verified Factorial's 77 Ah cells ahead of a planned Dodge Charger Daytona demonstration fleet (FEST specs at over 390 Wh/kg, per Stellantis). The newer story is everything beyond the big-OEM development deals: an In-Q-Tel strategic investment (March 2026, alongside POSCO Future M and Philenergy), drone partnerships across three continents (KULR, Tulip Tech, JRES), and a Karma Automotive program billed as the first U.S. solid-state battery production program for passenger vehicles (February 2026, starting with the Kaveya super-coupe). 

The listing pitch leans hard on defense & aerospace and hyperscale data centers, which tells you where battery money thinks the growth is. A fresh SPAC listing in a sector where SPAC listings have a… documented track record, but Factorial arrives with more real-world vehicle miles than most of them had at debut.

ENVX: Enovix

One-liner: Silicon anodes, now shipping and now with a named customer. Founded / HQ: 2007. Fremont, CA. Went public: SPAC with Rodgers Silicon Valley Acquisition, July 2021 (NASDAQ).

Enovix makes lithium-ion cells with a 100% active silicon anode in a proprietary 3D architecture: a design the company says delivers meaningfully higher energy density than standard graphite-anode cells. Its initial commercial market is consumer electronics (smartphones, laptops, AR/VR devices, wearables), where a denser cell translates directly into longer battery life in the same form factor. Enovix's second-generation factory, Fab2, had its grand opening in Penang, Malaysia on August 8, 2024: a USD $1.2B high-volume manufacturing facility built to house up to four production lines. Wow business updates are kind of boring, tell me more about the chemistry…

SLDP: Solid Power

One-liner: Sulfide-electrolyte solid-state. Founded / HQ: 2011 (University of Colorado spinout). Louisville, CO (cells) and Thornton, CO (electrolyte). Went public: SPAC with Decarbonization Plus Acquisition III, December 2021 (NASDAQ).

Solid Power is developing sulfide-based solid-state batteries. The company has two parallel revenue paths: it licenses its cell technology and produces pilot-scale A- and B-sample cells at its Louisville, Colorado facility (SP1), and it sells its sulfide solid electrolyte material to partners and researchers from Thornton (SP2). BMW remains the anchor automotive partner, with Solid Power's cells installed in a BMW i7 road-test vehicle in May 2025: a milestone CEO John Van Scoter characterized as "key B-sample phase." Ford's role has diminished materially: its JDA was extended only through December 2025 and Ford is absent from the more important Joint Evaluation Agreement with Samsung SDI and BMW signed October 2025, which is now the centerpiece. A DOE grant of up to $50M (September 2024) is funding a continuous electrolyte line at Thornton, scaling capacity from 30 to 75 metric tons/year by 2026 and 140 by 2028. The stock moves on partnership and sample-delivery milestones. Alyssa used to own this stock and she was offended by it moving based on seemingly random chance so she dropped it at a loss for her mental health: sulfide-based solid-state batteries had already taken too much from her when she studied them for her doctoral thesis.

SES: SES AI

One-liner: A battery company that is following the AI hype. Founded / HQ: 2012 (MIT spinout, originally SolidEnergy Systems). Woburn, MA. Went public: SPAC with Ivanhoe Capital Acquisition, February 2022 (NYSE).

SES was originally developing lithium-metal hybrid battery cells for EVs: pairing a lithium-metal anode with a liquid electrolyte. That's no longer the business. In a March 2026 MIT Technology Review feature, CEO Qichao Hu said flatly that it's "just not possible for a Western company to build a sustainable business" in EV batteries. The GM JDA concluded in September 2024; the Honda agreement was converted to a services arrangement; both Honda and Hyundai JDAs expired in December 2025 without public renewal. 

In its own framing (Q4 2025 shareholder letter), SES now operates three revenue-generating business units plus an AI platform:

Underpinning all three is Molecular Universe (MU), an AI materials-discovery platform (MU-1.0 launched October 2025 with NVIDIA and GPT-5 integration). Management treats MU revenue as a small 2026 contributor and argues its real value is platform IP and the competitive edge it gives the three product lines.

For advanced materials, a JV with Hisun was announced in fall 2025 to commercialize MU-discovered electrolytes at Hisun's 150,000-ton annual scale. Six breakthroughs are currently being tested by 40+ customers.

A $30M buyback was announced in April 2025. The SES AI name is now accurate in a way it wasn't when the rebrand happened: the AI business is the business.

EVs, Storage, Charging

Here's where batteries actually go to work. One of these names is a mass-market giant (Tesla). The rest are pure-play deployment companies whose stocks tend to rise and fall with EV adoption, infrastructure spending, and grid build-out timing.

TSLA: Tesla

One-liner: The EV-and-battery-and-AI giant. Founded / HQ: 2003. Austin, TX (moved from Palo Alto in 2021; reincorporated in Texas mid-2024). Went public: Traditional IPO on NASDAQ, June 29, 2010.

Tesla makes EVs, stationary battery storage (Megapack for grid-scale, Powerwall for homes), solar, and is developing humanoid robotics (Optimus) and autonomous driving software. The product lineup keeps evolving: in Q4 2025 Tesla rolled out new standard and performance Model Y variants, and Tesla Semi and Cybercab are both targeted to begin production in 1H 2026, with the next-generation Roadster still in design development. Optimus Gen 3 is being readied for mass production, with the first production line being installed in California and start of production planned before the end of 2026. Megapack has become a material profit center: FY2025 energy revenue ~$12.77B (+27%) with 46.7 GWh deployed (+49%), with Shanghai Megafactory already in production (40 GWh) and Megafactory Houston slated to begin Megapack 3 and Megablock production in 2026. The lithium refinery has commenced pilot production and is in early ramp. By market cap, TSLA dwarfs every other name on this list combined.

FLNC: Fluence Energy

One-liner: Grid-scale storage integrator. Founded / HQ: 2018 (joint venture of Siemens and AES). Arlington, VA. Went public: Traditional IPO on NASDAQ, Fall 2021.

Fluence designs and deploys utility-scale battery storage systems: the huge battery arrays that sit next to power plants and help grids balance supply and demand. The current product lineup is Smartstack (the flagship launched February 2025), Gridstack, Gridstack Pro, Edgestack, Sunstack, and Ultrastack, paired with Fluence IQ software: Mosaic for market bidding and Nispera for asset performance management. By gigawatt-hours deployed, Fluence is one of the largest battery storage integrators in the world.

2025 was brutal. We won’t relive it. Q1 FY2026 looked like a different company. Backlog (future revenue already under contract) hit a record $5.5 billion, liquidity climbed to roughly $1.1 billion, and revenue jumped about 154% year over year. Still operating at a loss, but on a wildly different trajectory than in the spring. The real drama is upstairs, not inside the business. Fluence is not being sold, but AES, one of its founding parents, is changing hands. And because Fluence still has a supervoting control structure, that ownership shift matters more than it would at a normal public company.

Battery Business Glossary

A pass: When an investor declines to invest now but signals they will re-engage at a milestone, usually a later round. Sometimes genuine, sometimes polite ghosting in a Patagonia vest. The job is to figure out which.

A sample / B sample / C sample: The three engineering stages of a battery cell on its way to production. A samples prove the chemistry works in a real cell format. B samples are pre-production cells in the real form factor at meaningful volume. C samples are built on production tooling, which is what an OEM actually qualifies for serial production. Automotive customers are sticklers about which gate you are at and which line built the cell. 

Accelerator: Short, cohort-based program, usually 3 to 6 months. Takes a small equity stake in exchange for cash, mentorship, and a demo day. Y Combinator is the prototype. A useful sprint, not a substitute for customers, chemistry, or a pilot line that behaves.

Asset-Light: A business model that owns less physical infrastructure, such as factories and equipment, and outsources production to contract manufacturers. Trade-off: lower capex and risk, less margin and control. Great until your supplier becomes the main character.

Backlog: Future revenue already under contract but not yet delivered. For a project-based business like Fluence, backlog is the leading indicator that matters most. A growing backlog means orders are coming in faster than you can fulfill them. Champagne problem, but still a problem.

BAU (Business as Usual): Status quo. Nothing special happening. Often used to describe what is not worth a meeting, which is most meetings, spiritually.

Burn Rate: How fast a company is spending cash, usually expressed monthly. A startup burning $2M/month with $24M in the bank has 12 months of runway. Battery startups have famously high burn rates because the capex is enormous and revenue arrives late. 

Buyback (Share Repurchase): When a company buys back its own shares from the open market. Reduces share count and, in theory, raises value per remaining share. SES announced a $30M buyback in April 2025. Wall Street loves a “we believe in ourselves” moment.

CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate): The smoothed annual growth rate over a period of time. A market growing from $100M to $200M over five years did not grow the same amount every year, but CAGR tells you the steady annual rate that would get it there. Useful, clean, and often abused by people trying to make a market look inevitable.

CapEx (Capital Expenditure): Money spent on long-term physical assets: buildings, equipment, gigafactories. Hits the balance sheet and depreciates over years. Building a cathode plant is capex. Battery manufacturing is famously capex-heavy.

Commodity: A product where buyers do not care who made it because all versions are interchangeable. They mostly care about price. Lithium carbonate is a commodity. A QuantumScape solid-state cell is not. Commodity status means you made it to the big leagues. Congrats. Unfortunately, the big leagues also come with brutal pricing pressure and your margins get crushed. LFP cells made in China are a commodity, sorry.

Contract Manufacturing: Outsourcing production to a third party that builds your product in their facility. Common in consumer electronics, increasingly common in batteries. Lets a company go asset-light at the cost of margin and control. Helpful, but you are trusting someone else with your baby and your yield curve.

Convertible Debt: A loan that can be converted into equity, or stock, under specific conditions, usually at a discount. Popular with growth companies because it delays the question of valuation. Kicking the valuation can down the road, but with legal documents.

COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf): Hardware you can buy from a catalog without customization. “COTS cells” usually means standard cells ordered in bulk instead of a custom-designed cell. Shorthand for cheap, available, predictable. Not glamorous, but neither is a purchase order that actually ships.

DOE (Department of Energy): The federal agency that runs most US battery and clean-energy funding programs: ATVM loans, 45X and 48C tax credits, grants, and the Loan Programs Office. The DOE shows up in almost every story on this list. Like a funding fairy godparent, but with compliance paperwork.

Dual-Listed: A company whose shares trade on more than one stock exchange. LAC trades on both NYSE and TSX. Useful for accessing larger capital pools, but creates complexity and arbitrage opportunities between exchanges. Because one ticker was apparently too emotionally simple.

Equity Raise: Selling new shares to investors to bring in cash. Dilutes existing shareholders but does not add debt. Most of the small-cap battery names on this list raise equity routinely to fund operations. Dilution hurts, but bankruptcy has worse branding.

Evergreen Fund: A fund that recycles its returns back into new investments instead of distributing them to LPs. No fixed end date, self-sustaining. Contrast with traditional 10-year VC funds that have to wind down on a clock. Less “fund expires soon,” more “capital sourdough starter.”

FAST-41: A 2015 federal program that streamlines permitting for major infrastructure projects, including critical-minerals projects. ALB’s Kings Mountain project cleared FAST-41 in March 2026, the 12th mining-related project to do so. Permitting, but with slightly fewer circles of paperwork hell.

FID (Final Investment Decision): The board-level commitment to actually build a major capital project. Before FID, everything is studies and renderings; after FID, money flows into construction. Thacker Pass reached FID in 2025. This is the moment the slide deck becomes invoices.

GP (General Partner): The VCs themselves: the people who run the fund, source deals, and make investment decisions. Distinct from LPs, whose money is in the fund. GPs collect a management fee, typically 2%, and a share of profits, typically 20%. The people holding the checkbook and saying “interesting” in meetings.

GWh (Gigawatt-hour): A unit of energy equal to 1 million kWh. The standard scale for utility-scale storage and gigafactory capacity. A “40 GWh factory” produces enough cells per year to store 40 gigawatt-hours of energy. Tesla deployed 46.7 GWh of energy storage in 2025. 

Impairment: An accounting write-down when an asset’s book value gets reduced because it is no longer worth what the company paid. Albemarle took a $1.3B impairment on its Kemerton plant before idling it. One-time hit, real signal. Accounting’s way of saying, “We need to talk.”

Incubator: Longer, sometimes years, more hands-on early-stage program. Often provides office space, shared services, and gradual support without a fixed graduation date. Hardware and deep-tech companies, including most battery startups, tend to live in incubators rather than accelerators. Think: Greentown Labs.

Inventions Assignment: A contract clause that says anything an employee or founder invents while working for the company belongs to the company, not the individual. Critical in battery startups because IP is often the whole asset. If your “breakthrough electrolyte” lives in a founder’s notebook instead of the company’s cap table story, congratulations, you have invented diligence hell. 

IPO (Initial Public Offering): The traditional way a private company goes public: hires investment banks, prices shares, lists on an exchange. Tesla and Fluence went public via traditional IPO. Slower and more rigorous than a SPAC, with more scrutiny. Basically the formal wedding, not the Vegas version.

JDA (Joint Development Agreement): A contract between two companies to co-develop a product, usually with milestones, IP rights, and exclusivity terms. BMW and Solid Power have a JDA. It does not guarantee a commercial deal. It is an engagement framework, not an offtake. Translation: they are talking seriously, not married and certainly not exclusive.

JV (Joint Venture): A separate company owned by two or more parents that share capital, control, and profits. GM owns about 38% of the Thacker Pass JV with LAC. Common when one party brings technology and the other brings capital or operational expertise. Corporate co-parenting, with lawyers.

Liquidity: The cash and easily accessible credit a company can use to meet obligations. Different from total assets. A gigafactory is an asset, not liquidity. Fluence reported about $1.1B in liquidity in Q1 FY2026. You cannot pay payroll with “but the building is worth a lot.”

LP (Limited Partner): The people whose money is in a VC fund: pension funds, endowments, family offices, sovereign wealth funds. They commit capital but do not make individual investment decisions. Distinct from GPs. The money behind the money.

Market Cap (Market Capitalization): Total value of a company’s outstanding shares, calculated as share price times shares outstanding. Standard measure of company size in public markets. Tesla’s market cap dwarfs every other name on the BBB watchlist combined. “Small cap” generally means under $2B. Cute little multibillion-dollar company.

NASDAQ: One of the two major US stock exchanges. More tech-heavy than NYSE. ENVX, FLNC, SLDP, TSLA, and (since December 2025) QS all trade on NASDAQ. The exchange where growth stories go to be admired, questioned, and occasionally humbled.

Non-Disparagement Clause: A contract clause that says you cannot publicly trash the company, founders, investors, employees, or sometimes the product after signing. Common in employment agreements, separation agreements, settlements, and founder disputes. In battery startups, it often shows up right when the lab stories get spicy. Translation: “You may know where the bodies are buried, but you agreed not to make a LinkedIn post about it.”

NYSE (New York Stock Exchange): The other major US exchange. Older, traditionally more “blue chip.” ALB, QS until late 2025, and SES trade on NYSE. Buttoned-up finance energy.

Offtake (Offtake Agreement): A contract where a buyer commits to purchase a specific volume of a producer’s output, often years in advance. Critical for battery materials companies because it is how they prove demand to investors and lenders. Panasonic’s 10,000-tonne deal with Novonix is an offtake. In battery materials, “someone promised to buy it” is not a detail. It is the plot.

OpEx (Operating Expenditure): Day-to-day operating costs: salaries, electricity, raw materials, rent. Hits the income statement immediately. The capex/opex split matters in batteries because gigafactories require massive upfront capex before any opex revenue starts. 

OTC (Over-the-Counter): Stocks that trade outside the major exchanges, often through dealer networks. Less regulated, less liquid, often a sign of either an early-stage or struggling company. ABAT traded OTC before uplisting to NASDAQ. The financial equivalent of “technically public.”

Pilot Production / Pilot Scale: The intermediate manufacturing stage between lab samples and full commercial production. Pilot lines run real product on real equipment to prove the process works at scale before committing to a gigafactory. Most battery startups die between pilot and commercial. 

Pre-Revenue: A company with no meaningful product revenue yet. QuantumScape is the classic pre-revenue battery name: public, well-funded, but not selling anything commercially. Common in deep tech, weird in most other industries. In batteries, “pre-revenue” can still somehow come with a market cap and a conference keynote.

Pure-Play: A company that does one thing. ABAT is a pure-play battery recycler. Tesla is not a pure-play anything. Investors like pure-plays because they offer cleaner exposure to a specific theme. One business model, fewer plotlines.

Reverse Merger: A way for a private company to go public by buying or merging with an already-public shell company, skipping the IPO process. Faster and cheaper than a real IPO, but with reputational baggage. Financial shortcut, but everyone can still see the footprints.

Reverse Stock Split: Combining multiple existing shares into one to raise the share price. A 1-for-20 reverse split turns 20 shares at $1 into 1 share at $20. Companies do this when share price gets so low it threatens exchange listing rules. ABAT did 1-for-15 in 2023. Same pizza, fewer slices, less delisting panic.

Runway: How long a company can operate at its current burn rate before running out of cash. $24M in the bank with $2M/month burn equals 12 months of runway. The single most important number for any pre-revenue or pre-profit battery startup. 

SAM (Serviceable Available Market): The portion of TAM you can realistically serve based on your product type, tech readiness, geography, and customer segment. Less “everyone who has ever needed energy storage,” more “the customers your actual product could plausibly reach.” Still pretty optimistic.

Series A / B / C / D / E: Successive rounds of venture funding. Seed comes first, usually idea or early product, then Series A, typically early revenue or strong traction, B for scaling, and C and beyond for growth and pre-IPO. Each round typically values the company higher and brings in larger investors. Battery companies often need many rounds before commercial revenue, which is part of why so many ended up as SPACs. Alphabet soup, but each letter costs more.

Shareholder Agreement: A contract between a company’s shareholders that governs rights, restrictions, and decision-making: who can sell shares, who gets voting rights, what happens in a financing, who has information rights, and how messy founder/investor situations get handled. The charter says what the company is. The shareholder agreement says how everyone behaves when money, control, and ego enter the room. Very different documents, emotionally.

SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market): The share of SAM you can realistically capture in the near term based on your resources, strategy, competition, and sales motion. This is the number investors actually care about. TAM is the dream. SOM is the homework.

SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company): A “blank-check” public company that exists only to merge with a private company and take it public, sidestepping the IPO process. The 2020 to 2021 SPAC boom is how QS, ENVX, SLDP, and SES all got listed. Faster and easier than a real IPO, with less scrutiny, which is why many SPAC companies have struggled post-listing. The battery market’s chaotic group project era.

NOTE: A SPAC merger is one specific type of reverse merger. All SPAC mergers are reverse mergers. Not all reverse mergers are SPAC mergers.

Spinoff / Spinout: A new company carved out of an existing one. Albemarle was spun out of Ethyl Corporation; Novonix from Jeff Dahn’s lab at Dalhousie. The new entity gets its own management, balance sheet, and stock listing. Corporate mitosis, but with bankers.

Spot Price: The price to buy a commodity right now for immediate delivery, set by live supply and demand. Lithium carbonate has a spot price that moves daily. Contrast with contract prices, which lock in over months or years. Spot is volatile; contracts smooth it out, which is why most serious offtake deals are not priced purely at spot. Spot price has the emotional stability of a group chat during earnings season.

Supervoting (Dual-Class Shares): A share structure where some shares carry more voting rights than others. Lets founders or strategic owners keep control even after going public. Fluence has a supervoting structure that makes its parent companies’ actions more consequential than their economic stake suggests. One share, one vote, except when absolutely not.

TAM (Total Addressable Market): The dream number. The total revenue opportunity if you somehow sold to every possible customer in the world. Useful for showing scale, dangerous when treated like a plan. Every startup pitch has a TAM slide. Most of them are science fiction with a dollar sign.

TRL (Technology Readiness Level): A 1-to-9 scale, NASA-originated and now standard at DOE, for how mature a technology is. TRL 1 is “basic principles observed in lab”; TRL 9 is “actually flying or in commercial production.” Battery grant applications are full of TRL claims. Useful, but easy to inflate. Somewhere, a coin cell is being called TRL 6 with a straight face. 

Trough of Sorrow: The painful flat stretch after launch hype dies but before product-market fit kicks in. Revenue is flat, growth is flat, founders question every life choice. Paul Graham’s term, and it applies to almost every battery company that has ever existed. A vibes recession, but operational.

Uplisted: Moving from a smaller exchange or OTC to a major one. Signals the company has hit minimum size and reporting standards. ABAT uplisted from OTC to NASDAQ in September 2023 after a 1-for-15 reverse split. A graduation ceremony with compliance filings.

Valley of Death: Battery-specific cousin of the trough of sorrow. The gap between successful lab or pilot results and commercial-scale production where most battery startups die. The science works, the small samples are great, but the capex required to scale is enormous and revenue is years out. The valley has excellent slide decks and terrible cash flow.

Warrants: A contract giving the holder the right to buy a company’s stock at a fixed price within a set window. Common in financing deals as a “kicker” for the lender or investor. Penny warrants are a special case. A little upside confetti tucked into the financing package.

YoY (Year-Over-Year): Comparing a metric to the same period a year prior. “Revenue grew 38% YoY” means it is 38% higher than the same quarter last year. Standard way to strip out seasonality. 

Battery Burn Book
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