Dr. Qichao Hu

So in terms of portable energy storage, you can't get better than lithium because it's already the lightest metal we have.

So that's why we focus on that.

Now, to make lithium metal safe and stable for a long time for different applications, it's really difficult to come up with a material called electrolyte for the lithium metal.

So you had to come up with an electrolyte material that was stable and safe on lithium metal.

So then a lot of the work was coming up with a cocktail, a formulation with new small molecules for lithium metal that will make it safe and stable.

Got it.

Almost in parallel.

So we were really frustrated with how slow and how much work was taken to come up with, to test different cocktails for the lithium metal electrolyte.

So this tool, Molecular Universe, really came out of that.

So we wanted to, okay, say if we have a database, if someone just had mapped all the small molecules that could be used for this battery and have almost like a dictionary there for us, and then we could just go to the dictionary, find the molecules,

And then also instead of testing it, then if we just had a model and then we only give it, for example, just the first phase or so, and then we can almost predict the end of life.

And then instead of having a human doing the testing in a very inefficient way, if we just had a high-throughput robot.

So we had all these ideas, but then no one really supplied these tools to us.

So we built these tools.

That's awesome.

So it's lighter and then smaller.

What that means, for example, if you were to put that in the pickup truck, the range of a pickup truck is dependent on the amount of battery power and also the weight of the truck.

So if you can make the battery lighter, then that truck can go farther or you can put one more passenger.

You can put more payloads.

And then same thing with drones.