Bor Jang, the former dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science at Wright State University and the executive chairman of Solidion, discovered graphene in 2002, and patented it.
Graphene will help electric vehicle and smartphone batteries last longer and charge faster while dissipating heat safely and completely, the company’s leaders have said.
In 2016, Global Graphene Group, often referred to as “G3″ or “G-cubed,” received a $10 million investment from Western & Southern Insurance in Cincinnati and was reorganized into G3 as an umbrella over the top of several organizations.
Jang said the merger represents “a momentous achievement for our company.”
Headquartered in Dallas, Texas with a 55,000-square-foot production facility at 1235 McCooke Ave. in Dayton, Solidion’s core business includes manufacturing of battery materials and components, as well as development and production of next-generation batteries for energy storage systems and electric vehicles for ground, air and sea transportation.
Its battery products division makes anode, cathode and electrolyte components specifically geared toward EV batteries, said Stuart Blair, G3’s vice president of finance. “The other line of Global Graphene’s businesses is the traditional graphite and graphene products and that is conducted through Angstron Materials company,” which was founded in 2006, Blair told Dayton Daily News. “That entity will continue on underneath G-cubed.”
Solidion has 25 employees, 23 of them in Dayton, he said.
“With our immediate plans to commercialize EV battery components, we will be on an expansion and growth curve during the next year,” Blair said. The company expects to add about 100 jobs during that time as a result of the merger, he said.
Solidion boasts more than 550 patents, making it “exceptionally IP (intellectual property)-rich,” Blair said. It entered the NASDAQ exchange this month as STI.
“That will provide Solidion with access to that public capital market,” Blair said. “Costs to commercialize battery production are huge. They’re beyond what is available to smaller privately held companies, so access to a public capital market will provide those resources.”
Solidion CEO Jaymes Winters, who previously was CEO of Nubia Brand International, said the formation of Solidion as a new venture made sense because Nubia was looking for “a cutting-edge type of merger partner.”
“We looked at over 100 companies,” Winters told this news outlet. “A satellite company in Singapore, an office co-sharing space in Malaysia. A defense company in Israel. An interactive glass company in Taiwan. A lot of U.S. companies, biotech, construction, everything, before we settled on Honeycomb because they had a portfolio that had not been commercialized. The portfolio of battery technology, we feel like that is the future.
“At the end of the day, we thought that this was the best and most attractive target that we can put in front of our shareholders.”
Initially, Solidion will make the components that go inside an EV battery, Blair said, including “the anode, which is the negative terminal, the cathode, which is the positive, the electrolyte, which is the juice that flows between them, and carries the current.”
Eventually, that will evolve into solid-state batteries, but “that’s another few years down the road,” he said.
“To paraphrase a BASF tagline ‘We’re not going to make EV batteries. We’re going to make EV batteries better,’ and we’re going to make EV batteries better through these components and the technology involved with EV battery component production, silicon anode production and graphite that will all be utilized for this,” Blair said.
Winters said Honeycomb’s track record of performance and expertise in battery technologies, combined with the investment by Nubia and the continued acceleration of the EV battery market, will allow Solidion to extend its leading industry position.
“We are looking forward to seeing what we can accomplish in this new phase of the company’s existence,” he said.
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