General Motors is partnering with materials science startup Forge Nano on new technologies to improve performance and battery life for electric vehicle cells.

On Wednesday, the investment arm of the automaker, GM Ventures, invested $10 million in Forge Nano. The startup is working on a thin coating, the company says will improve safety and increase the lifetime of cathode-active materials, thus lowering the overall cost of batteries.

While part of the strategic investment, GM and Forge Nano have also agreed to a deal that will see the automaker use the startup's coating - known as Atomic Armor, an "atomic layer deposition technology".

A lithium-ion battery has a cathode that is the side which holds the lithium ions when the battery is charged and releases them once discharged. The other electrode in a battery cell is the anode, which sucks in the lithium ions as it is charging and has it release during use. While a few common mixes of cathode materials exist, including lithium, nickel, manganese, and cobalt, lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries continue to make further inroads with GM and other automakers, including Tesla and Ford. The partnership and investment come at the same time that GM is dropping its branding of Ultium batteries and taking a turn away from a "single cell, single chemistry, single form factor strategy to more of a multi-cell, multi-supplier, multi-chemistry, multi-form factor strategy for our battery roadmap," Jack Crawley, a GM spokesperson, told TechCrunch.

GM's EV sales increased by 60% year-over-year in the third quarter, but the growth doesn't quite reach the pace the company and investors had hoped for. EVs still only account for 4.9% of the total third-quarter sales of GM, and the CEO Mary Barra lowered the guidance for 2024 to 200,000 sold units.

GM Ventures always invests in startups with an eye toward potential strategic partnerships to improve its own products. As part of the investment into the space of electrification and battery, GM Ventures has actually put $167 million into 18 portfolio companies, including the likes of Soelect, Mitra Chem, and SolidEnergy Systems.

"GM is always looking for ways we can make EVs more effective [and] pursue better battery performance," Crawley said. "So atomic layer deposition – the ability to control our chemistry and structure of our battery materials at the atom-by-atom level – is certainly something we're interested in."

This technology could allow for greater energy density, faster charging, and increased battery life, Crawley added.

Atomic Armor, said Forge Nano's CEO, Paul Lichty, increases the safety of cells through prevention of things such as thermal runway events that can lead to battery fires.
It does this with an ultra-thin ceramic layer to coat materials at the atomic particle level leading to stable and robust performance, said Lichty.

The battery cell materials nowadays are commonly manufactured to be coated, but according to Lichty, they are not uniform, and most surely not at the atomic level.

"We see the downsides there when it comes to batteries that don't have enough energy for things like eVTOLs or electric aircraft or long-range vehicles," Lichty said. Most of Forge Nano's commercial customers today are in aerospace and defense, but this investment from GM brings them closer to wider-scale adoption in the EV industry, he added.

"We're pretty much stopping corrosion inside the cell that kills them quickly, whether it's heat or from use," said James Trevey, chief technology officer at Forge Nano. "The more extreme the application, the more enhancement you're going to see from Atomic Armor."

He said in the company's trials and commercial deployments, Forge Nano has been able to "extract more lithium out of that cathode when we cycle than anybody else" using "lithium that's already in there," thus increasing the energy density of a battery cell up to 20%.

It's kind of like finding 20% more lithium just lying around on the ground and that you can access it essentially for free," he said.

The coating technology from Forge Nano can be plugged directly into a cell manufacturer's existing process, creating cost savings at scale as high as 20%, according to the chief executive.

The company's battery cell subsidiary, Forge Battery, is making prototype cells today through the Atomic Armor platform while the company continues to build its own gigafactory in North Carolina using a $100 million award the company received in September from the Department of Energy. Forged Battery will start making 2170 cells with Forge's Atomic Armor inside in 2026.