Bill Gates-Backed Battery Company Ambri Files for Bankruptcy

The battery company that Bill Gates was optimistic about has gone bankrupt. Ambri, a liquid metal battery manufacturing company, whose products were once highly anticipated: to achieve substitution for lithium batteries.

This attracted investors including Bill Gates to bet on its investment. However, after burning through 1 billion dollars, Ambri still couldn't achieve large-scale mass production. Eventually, 14 years after its establishment, this battery company collapsed at the peak moment of the new energy.

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Recently, the so-called Ambri, the ancestor of liquid metal batteries, announced its application for bankruptcy.

The chief commercial officer Adam Briggs said that the company had made a lot of attempts, but in the end felt that there was only one way to go, which was to file for bankruptcy.

The company can't operate anymore.

Although Ambri's idea is novel and the vision of replacing lithium batteries is grand, it has attracted over 100 million dollars in financing, and Bill Gates has invested in three rounds.

But in the 14 years since its establishment, Ambri has been burning money, not achieving self-hematopoiesis, the technology has not been implemented, and the product has not been mass-produced on a large scale.

Investors have lost patience, Ambri can't get new financing, the company's funds are in crisis, and finally goes bankrupt and will be auctioned off at an auction price of 38 million US dollars.

A well-known battery expert founded it and was favored by Bill Gates. How did Ambri fall?

Ambri from establishment to bankruptcy

Amrbi was founded in 2010, and the founder Donald Sadoway graduated from the University of Toronto in Canada for his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees, and is an electrochemical expert and an honorary professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the early years, he had studied to develop new materials to increase the energy density of lithium ions.

△Donald Sadoway (left) and his doctoral student David Bradwell (right)

Later, he focused his research on grid-level energy storage batteries, and he believed that if humans want to get rid of their dependence on fossil fuels, energy storage technology must be utilized.

But he judged that due to cost and energy density reasons, lithium ions could not be the choice for grid-level energy storage, so he invented a brand-new battery in 2009:

Liquid metal battery.

Unlike traditional batteries, this battery consists of three independent liquids:

The anode uses magnesium (later converted to calcium), the cathode uses molten antimony, and the electrolyte uses molten salt electrolyte.

Due to the density difference, the three are stacked and layered.

When discharging to the outside, magnesium ions sink and form an alloy with antimony. During the entire discharge process, the electrode materials are fully utilized.

This solves the dendrite problem, and the battery has a longer lifespan. Sadoway and his team introduced that it can operate for 20 years without a decrease in performance. The manufacturing cost is also lower than that of lithium batteries.

Based on this technology, Sadoway and his student David Bradwell jointly founded Ambri. Soon obtained millions of dollars in financing, and the investors included the US oil giant Total, the US Department of Energy, and also Bill Gates.

Bill Gates got to know Sadoway through an online course.

One of Sadoway's online courses once went viral on social platforms and attracted Bill Gates.

He really appreciated this professor and praised him as the best chemist in the world, and also visited Sadoway at MIT.

When visiting, Bill Gates said that if there was a liquid metal battery startup company, he would be willing to invest.

In addition to the initial stage of establishment, in 2014 and 2021, Ambri successively completed financings of 35 million US dollars (which was about 213 million yuan at that time) and 144 million US dollars in financing (which was about 930 million yuan at that time).

Bill Gates also participated in the investment.

In 2023, Ambri launched the F-round financing and planned to raise 300 million US dollars. However, the main investors finally chose to withdraw, Ambri's financing failed, and the capital chain broke.

Ambri tried to save the company and made a last-ditch effort: last November, it laid off staff to reduce costs and cut off two-thirds of the employees. But in the end, it still couldn't escape the fate of bankruptcy.

Its chief commercial officer Briggs explained the company's spending after the bankruptcy, saying that although the cost of the battery product itself is lower than that of lithium batteries, the cost of building the factory is high.

And he said that the product is very close to being commercialized, because the company retains the core team and is still developing the product at the expected speed. And the external market is still vast, and there is a huge opportunity for non-lithium-ion batteries.

To sum up Ambri's journey, it presented a claimed better technical route, but it still couldn't get through in 14 years, the product didn't land, and it didn't achieve commercialization.

Finally, the capital chain broke and went bankrupt and was auctioned off.

If there is no buyer with a higher bid, Ambri will be acquired by a consortium of creditors. The creditor consortium promised that if they take over, they will continue to finance and support the company's development.

However, on the one hand, the cost of lithium batteries is decreasing year by year, and on the other hand, the industry realizes the life problem of lithium batteries and tries to extend the life and establish a recycling gradient mechanism. It is even more difficult to establish an advantage over lithium batteries in terms of cost and life.

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