Founder’s Lessons: Darren H. S. Tan from Unigrid Battery
Darren shared his experiences in the battery and clean energy industry. From the distinctive standpoint of sodium-ion battery to inflation reduction trends, he imparts unique insights into his entrepreneurship journey.
About
Welcome to the 33rd installment of Foothill Ventures’ Lessons from Founders series. Every so often, we publish an in-depth founder interview, ranging from early-stage entrepreneurs to successful businesses. Our conversations cover their personal journeys, the lessons that shaped them, their visions for the future, and their failures. We also learn more about their companies and about the challenges they try to solve. These insights and lessons are applicable to any entrepreneur — current or future.
UNIGRID Battery, established in 2021 in San Diego, is a sustainable energy storage startup that develops advanced sodium-ion batteries, with research spun out of UCSD’s chemistry lab, which features such luminary professors such as Zheng Chen and Shirley Meng. (Professor Meng is currently professor at the University of Chicago, and Chief Scientist at Argonne National Lab’s Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science). Their product targets energy storage, including residential, commercial, and grid-scale storage.
Darren, CEO and Co-founder of UNIGRID Battery, received his doctoral degree from UC San Diego with a specialization in chemical engineering. Having worked as a postdoctoral researcher at UCSD and a process engineer, Darren has deep expertise in energy storage systems. Now, he aims to transform the future of safe and sustainable energy storage technologies to improve people’s lives and the environment.
Why we invested in UNIGRID: UNIGRID has an excellent product-market fit in the massive and growing energy storage market, which is expected to be over $140bn by the end of 2030, with a 20.4% CAGR. Furthermore, UNIGRID has strong technology backed by an impressive technical team. Preliminary research has shown that the battery has solid performance in terms of performance, safety, and cycle life. The technology path has multiple advantages, in terms of cost, safety, and abundance of materials compared to the Li-ion battery. The team received their Ph.D.s from UCSD professors Zheng Chen and Shirley Meng, who are outstanding scientists in this field.
What is UNIGRID? And How Does UNIGRID Envision the Future?
UNIGRID is composed of a team of PhD graduates from UC San Diego, who are working to develop advanced sodium-ion batteries for clean energy storage applications. The United States set several ambitious goals, like dramatic carbon reductions and a net zero economy. To achieve all these goals by a certain date, we need terawatt hours of both renewable energy generation and battery storage. However, there’s not enough lithium in the world to do this job. Thankfully, the United States is blessed with 90% of the world’s sodium reserves, more than 1000 times more abundant than the entire world’s lithium reserves. This presents us with a tremendous opportunity to use these resources to power our electric grid.
Today, we consume so much sodium in our foods and in our bodies. In addition, we should utilize sodium in batteries to power our homes, offices, and workplaces. At UNIGRID, we envision that energy storage will be as ubiquitous as food and water storage in the near future. Today, everybody has home food storage. In the near future, everybody will also have home energy storage: think of a refrigerator for electrons, or a water tank for electrons. They will exist not just in homes, but in offices, communities, and anywhere that people need affordable, safe, and reliable electricity. And that is what we aim to do.
UNIGRID vs. Other Battery Technologies
When we think of batteries, we always imagine lithium-ion batteries, which are still expensive, unsafe, and have long payback times. However, our advanced sodium-ion batteries offer a unique value proposition. Firstly, sodium-ion batteries are half the cost of lithium-ion batteries because of their immense abundance and low cost of materials. Secondly, our batteries provide safer non-flammable compounds. We want to eliminate fire hazard risks so people can safely use our batteries. Most importantly, we eliminate all critical materials, such as lithium, cobalt, and copper, and reduce its import reliance.
Finally, we offer a unique alloy anode technology that allows us to double the volumetric energy densities of conventional sodium-ion batteries. Overall, with these strategies combined, we offer a balance of both high energy density and safety, as well as cost-effectiveness. That’s something that conventional lithium-ion or sodium ion cannot provide.
Inflation Reduction and Batteries
The Inflation Reduction Act has opened up tremendous potential in the sodium-ion field. In lithium-ion batteries, lithium material will still need to be imported at some point upstream of the supply chain, be it during the mining, refining, or material production stage. Thus, there is a limit to which we can incentivize lithium domestic production. On the other hand, the raw materials for sodium-ion are readily available in the United States. As such, there is potential for us to establish the entire sodium supply chain domestically, and the IRA offers a lot of incentives for us to accelerate this process.
An International Perspective: From United States to Asia
Asia has been the battery manufacturing hub for the last few decades and will likely continue to be. Thus, that is not the place where we should directly compete. Companies like ours in the United States have always strived for superior and advanced technology innovation. Our goal is always to ensure we are two steps ahead of everybody else. We offer the best product, the most cost-effective technology, the best performance, and the best utility for end users. Through this, we can always ensure people will always come to us, they always want to work with us. And that will be our continued strategy forward.
Looking at the current market situation, sodium-ion batteries appear to be the next battery technology wave to come. If we look at Asia, they have started using sodium ion batteries over the last two to three years. It is now starting to hit the United States. Today, we are probably the pioneers in advanced sodium ion chemistries. We address a lot of the fundamental problems with sodium ions, such as their energy density. And we aim to emerge as the leader in North American markets for sodium ion battery adoption. Therefore, we want to be the first movers and get into the market before the competition.
Darren’s Entrepreneurship Journey
Compared to other jobs that have taken in the past, entrepreneurship has many more ups and downs. Something I have grown to recognize is that support from family, friends, and mentors is extremely important. Without this, a lot of the tough times will be a lot more difficult to go through. Without the emotional, psychological, and sometimes financial support, we would not have arrived to where we are now. So, I am very appreciative of that.
Interviewed by Charles Ling. Videographed by Hannah Wu and Heidi Lu.
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Foothill Ventures is a $150M seed-stage technology firm. We back technical founders across software, life sciences, and frontier technologies.
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