QuantumScape (NYSE:QS) due to go public in the fourth quarter and agreed to merge with Kensington Capital (KCAC). The electric-car stock will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker QS.
The enterprise value of the new company is estimated to be worth $3.3 billion. The company builds solid-state lithium-metal batteries, which some believe are safer than conventional liquid-state batteries.
DirectorsTalk caught up with Graeme Purdy CEO of Ilika plc (LON:IKA) to ask if its Goliath solid-state batteries can compete with such well-funded competition.
Graeme Purdy told us, “Well, if you look at the roadmap of some of our competition, they are not dissimilar to the ones that we’ve been publicising and talking to partners about so in terms of the availability of our Goliath prototypes for evaluation, we’re very much on the same track.
One of the reasons for QuantumScape’s large, planned IPO is that actually they’re planning to build their own, let’s call it a ‘Gigafactory’ with the capacity to be able to manufacture those batteries. So, rule of thumb is that these plants cost between half a billion US to 750 million US per gigawatt hour, so they’re big investments. That’s part of the reason why QuantumScape are raising such a large amount of capital in order to fund that.
We’ve chosen a different route in that we will be going through the UKs national facility, the UKBIC, as the first step and then scaling up through a JV with an existing cell manufacturing company to get to the gigawatt scale.
So, we haven’t quite got the same demands for capital investment and I believe that we’ve got a very skilled, perfectly formed, development team in our organisation and we’ve made great progress over the last six months and expect further progress going forward.”
Ilika plc is a pioneer in a ground-breaking solid state battery technology able to meet the specific demands of a wide range of applications in MedTech, Industrial IoT, Electric Vehicles and Consumer Electronics.
