Episode 237 - Closing the Battery Manufacturing Knowledge Gap

Roberto Baldwin:

Hello, I'm your host, Roberto Baldwin, stepping in for Tomorrow Today host, Grayson Brulte. Welcome to another episode of SAE Tomorrow Today, a show about emerging technology and trends and mobility with leaders and innovators who will make it happen. 

On today's episode, we're absolutely honored to be joined by Tal Sholklapper, CEO of Voltaiq. We'll talk about Voltaiq's battery intelligence software and how it can accelerate the transition to a battery powered world. 

Tal, there's a lot going on in the world of sustainability. And really, when we talk about sustainability, we're really talking about batteries because it's so much a part of literally everything EV, the grid, whatever. To you, what is the current state of battery manufacturing in the United States? 

Tal Sholklapper:

I think we're at the early days. It really started with some smaller factories supporting the Department of Defense. And then really started off with a bang in this next generation with Panasonic Tesla Gigafactory.

And since then, we've seen a steady increase of these new factories and being announced. And now we're getting to that point, how are these factories are going to start getting up and running. Some of them are already in the middle of that ramp up phase, but we're going to see a whole lot more to really supply the Domestic need around battery supply for both EVs as well as other markets as well namely energy storage on the grid.

We're really at the, still closer to the starting line than we are to what this is going to be a mature state. 

Roberto Baldwin:

Yeah, when I talk to people about where EVs and batteries and all this is at, I really, my thing is I now say that we're at the Nokia brick phone. Of EVs. Yeah. We're not to the Sidekick, we're not to the BlackBerry, we're definitely not to the iPhone, the Android phone. We're still really early days. Is that is that true? That's how you see the world as well. Maybe not the phone analogy, but... 

Tal Sholklapper:

That really resonates. I think when I look at the battery market, we're talking with our customers and partners. I really liken this to, the semiconductor revolution and just the number of phases that happened there.

In batteries, we're going through a very similar transition early days. This was really, small scale consumer electronics devices started off with, the Sony camcorders and others, then EV started to take off and then everyone was, thought this market was going to explode, within five years, we're going to have all these factories.

Everything's going to be electric. The reality is it's a whole lot harder to actually make these things and not just make them, but make them in a cost effective way, and we're in that, like trough of disillusionment right now where really, this Cambrian explosion of, what could have been hundreds or thousands of different startups, just like semiconductors, you're going to have a handful of very large suppliers, figure this all out and make these devices work at scale.

Roberto Baldwin:

We see a lot of automakers. They made some really bold plans for EVs and for their own gigafactories, their own battery manufactured facilities. And recently as Some of them have been pulling back on those plans, maybe slowing down a little bit. No one has said, okay, we're not doing it anymore.

No one has just all that money we invested, it's gone. They've really pulled back on it. So what are your take on their concerns about what's going on? Is it really just let's just figure it out. Or is it something else? 

Tal Sholklapper:

I think yeah, a lot of it is. I think the right decision for some of these companies and you see them internally, even though they are slowing current programs they're really taking a look back and a hard look internally and figuring out what is that correct path forward here.

And I think, part of its market maturity just letting, waiting for the charging infrastructure really to start maturing. It is getting there. But at the end of the day, a lot of those early EV programs were, legacy automakers didn't really understand. Batteries, these are companies that have built themselves around mechanical engineering, really making a combustion part and, hatches and hoods and things like that, close and open.

They didn't really understand electrochemistry and how that fit into a vehicle. And. What is the right way to design that in? And what is the right way to do that in a cost-effective way for consumers? And so a lot of the early vehicles they put out there were frankly, too expensive. They had too many compromises.

There were too heavy. And so I think they're rightfully taking a look back and figuring out now what is the right? Strategy for going into this market. How do we do this cost competitively? What is the right team to do it? And so I think it's, they're on the right path just figuring out, what is the, the most efficient way forward to really be competitive long-term. Because China is coming and with low cost EVs. 

Roberto Baldwin:

And you talked about they, they weren't quite they'd used to, they were used to working with mechanical, so there is, let's talk a little bit about the knowledge gap, just in, in batteries and manufacturing, there's only so many people who have long term, like real gigafactory or running a gigafactory.

So that, that right there seems, a bit alarming for these automakers because they can hire a bunch of people who know. But you can't you, if you only have let's say 20 people on the entire planet who know how to run a gigafactory, it's, it's going to be hard to poach that one person from, company A to company B.

And so how do they get over there? Just keep spinning it up and keep hoping people figure it out. 

Tal Sholklapper:

Yeah. So I think it's a combination of things. One is finding some of those people and bringing some of that expertise in house. At the end of the day though, we can't throw bodies at it like they did in a lot of the early gigafactories in Korea, Japan, and China.

We don't have that talent base who understands this technology. We can't say our capital our labor is much more expensive. And so at the end of the day it's really about maximizing the learning rate of, the talent base that we do have and creating systems that allows them to learn and do this a whole lot faster.

And so one of the big drivers we've been doing with a range of our partners is really focusing on the digital infrastructure that not only allows for a much more rapid learning process. If you try to learn things on your own, it's going to be very slow. If you're doing it, an Excel worksheet, like a lot of these companies are doing today, you build those modern digital infrastructure.

You could actually dramatically accelerate that learning process. And then outside of that, what we've seen is by having these, Digital tools and templates and frameworks for customers. You make it much easier for people who are not battery experts to onboard and start understanding what's going on that battery factory. So they could help, figure out those problems and ramp up these factories sooner. 

Roberto Baldwin:

And then wrapping up factories, that's Voltaiq's, I want to say, jam. What the company has set up is it's actually quite impressive. And some of the numbers around, like what needs to be fixed as battery factories are spinning up are bonkers.

The first time I heard them, so what is Voltaiq doing to help alleviate some of these new battery manufacturing concerns? 

 Tal Sholklapper:

Yeah. So the big challenge around batteries as a whole is it takes a long time to see if a battery is going to be good or bad batteries. Once they're assembled, are this.

Closed living, breathing organism. There are chemical reactions. Each time you charge and discharge them, they actually expand and contract very sensitive to their temperature environments and very much like a living, breathing organism. And what we do at Voltaiq is help really understand from that charge and discharge heartbeat from the battery.

If that battery has any anomalies, any, differences, or if they're defective, really understanding from that early inception of the battery, if there's any issues, the fundamental challenge out of battery gigafactory, or even once you get to vehicles on the road is that, it takes you about a day to make a battery and then it takes you 30 days to see if that battery is good or bad.

And so if you're, making 30 days’ worth of bad batteries. That is a very not only is that very costly, but that's also a very slow learning cycle. And so we accelerate that, the day right after the assembly in a process that's called formation where you first charge the first heartbeat of the battery.

We could start telling you about that variability and the differences and the defects in those battery cells. And that allows you to start creating that faster feedback cycle so you can get these factories up and running sooner. 

Roberto Baldwin:

Because from your data, you can go back and say, oh, maybe at this point is where things went slightly wrong or slightly askew.

Tal Sholklapper:

And there's so many of these interconnected things from the materials to the processes, the settings cross, dozens of different assembly processes. It's really that. Digital infrastructure that allows you to a catch the problem sooner and then be, really pinpoint, where you should look, where you need to improve the process.

Roberto Baldwin:

And you talked about that 30 days, you won't know it's something's wrong for 30 days, traditionally. And so that those batteries that you've built, 30 days ago that are bad. That's it's something known as the battery scrap rate. These are just batteries you just can't use.

There's a pretty scary, really, or alarming number. Can the percentage of batteries that are known as battery scrap rate? What is that? 

Tal Sholklapper:

Yeah, so it's quite astonishing when you think about these factories in the early days. Just about everything that they make is Bad. It's not going to work.

It's not going to meet the customer requirements. It may have safety issues, these early factories. So the benchmark we like to point at, there's a large factory in North America that spun up and that's, they started production, the year after starting production, they were still scrapping 84 percent of the batteries coming out of that factory.

And then, only it took him about 40 years to actually get to profitability. And so if you think about these billion dollar investments as, if you're not getting paid back for four years, but beyond that, this scrap is costly, you're paying your people, you're paying for energy, you're paying for someone to actually haul away the scrap because it is toxic as well, and that needs to be recycled effectively. So it's a very expensive proposition that, is quite daunting as you're spinning up a new factory. 

Roberto Baldwin:

And then you wonder you probably wonder less at that point when you're talking to some of these automakers and they see these numbers and they're like 80 over 80% of my new batteries that I build maybe in the first year to six months, to a year, to two years, to four years are no good.

We just, we're paying a lot of people, a lot of money. We're paying for a lot of materials, we're paying for all, the energy to run these factories, everything that happens to make a factory run. And then 84, 80 percent of the end product is trash that we have to pay someone now to take away and recycle somewhere else.

And that, yeah it's, so it's not difficult to understand where it'd be where some of these companies are a little wary of moving forward. 

Tal Sholklapper:

Yeah. And it's, I remember the first conversations with the C suite at the car companies, and there was a lot of arrogance. They're like, we know how to manufacture things.

We've got material scientists, we know how to do this. We know how to put paint on a vehicle. And it's Nope, that's great.

That this is a whole different beast here. And so I think there's a more realism coming to bear. And I think they're trying to figure out what are those right teams to actually do this correctly.

Roberto Baldwin:

Yeah. Yeah. I think, learning by failure. We all learn by failure, but that's a pretty 80%. That's a, and so if, if a company says, okay, we're going to put the Voltaiq system in, we're going to have, we're going to be able to track what's going on. How quickly can they pull that scrap rate down?

Tal Sholklapper:

We've seen pretty immediate effects. What we actually would prefer to do is get started with these companies as they're prototyping and doing what's called pilot production ahead of full-scale production. It's a lot cheaper to figure out these problems at those stages where you're putting, 1000 worth of material versus 100, 000 worth of material and for each process run that you do. And yeah, we typically from deploying our software in what's called this end of line or the after the battery goes through that 1st formation process and after assembly 1st heartbeat, we could deliver start delivering value within a month and help them start to understand that they have.

And then, the typical payback we've seen is about, under three months for customers where, software is paying for itself with increased, volumes, increased decreased scrap rates, really helping them ramp up the factories a whole lot faster after that, too. 

Roberto Baldwin:

You're helping them get to profitability sooner, much sooner, hopefully quicker than four years. And how important is Giga factory profitability for the adapt adoption of EVs? 

Tal Sholklapper:

I think fundamentally, it's how expensive are those EVs gonna be for end consumers? , not everyone could afford a BMW or a Tesla.

And, if we want this to be a mainstream technology, we're gonna have to drop the cost. And that all comes down to the largest component now, which is the battery. If the batteries need to be, you need to be able to make them profitably and you need to be able to drop those costs. If you want these devices to be adopted in the mainstream.

Roberto Baldwin:

Yeah. The sort of price barrier is if we can't move to EVs, unless everyone can move to EVs is what needs to happen and the ability to make. So you're not wasting 80 percent of your product, which means the other 20 percent are very expensive because they have to pay for the other 80 percent and one way or another.

There was news out of China concerning the cost per kilowatt, and they're talking like 50 cents per kilowatt or 50. I'm sorry for kilowatt hour. And in the United States, we talked a lot about once we had 100 per kilowatt hour, then we're going to see parity between EVs and an internal combustion counterpart.

Do you see that happening to, in the United States with the next few years right now? If you're looking at like some of the average cost of vehicles, like some of you, like long, some long range EVs are lower than the average cost per vehicle, but it's still at the end of the day, we're talking about people who, yeah, they can't afford a, the average cost of a vehicle, which is $47,000 under $30k. We're looking under, we're hoping for under $30k. Do you see those sort of price drops happening here in the United States in the next few years? 

Tal Sholklapper:

I go back to when we started Voltaiq a little over 10 years ago and average lithium-ion battery, the price was over a thousand dollars per kilowatt hour.

And economies of scale are an amazing thing. As you see these production volumes ramp up and China's there, they are hitting that maturity point. They're getting to those full economies of scale and reaping the benefits. I think a lot of that supply chain in terms of technology, plant sizes some of it's going to remain international, I think to leverage those economies of scale near term, but it is a whole lot cheaper to, produce.

If you get rid of the shipping costs of these devices it ultimately, there is economics around producing more locally around a lot of these technologies. And I think we will, in a similar timeframe I think reach those economies of scale also domestically in North America as well.

Roberto Baldwin:

Yeah. We talk a lot about how China is ahead of us when it comes to EVs. And so I think they're almost they're the crystal ball of what we could have here at the, essentially. And I think we're catching up slowly, but as we catch up, I think there will be a point, maybe five years, we'll be, we'll have that 50, 50 per kilowatt hour price point, which would be nice.

Tal Sholklapper:

Yeah, I think a similar range. And I think a lot of it is just getting out of our own way to some degree, it's got to accelerate the build out of some of these factories, start the learning. And I think, yeah, just make sure, people think it's going to be easy. You just got to, it is going to be hard work and just have that right attitude to go in there.

And people have to go in there and figure out how to make these factories work and get them up and running and take pride in that. So that's really going to be key for. Domestic production as a whole. Oh yeah, definitely. 

Roberto Baldwin:

I think there was, there really was an idea that I think for a lot of automakers that it's just a battery and a motor. And we don't have to worry about carburetors, we don't have to worry about camshafts, we don't have to worry about pistons, we don't have to worry about all these things. It's just a battery, and my phone has a battery. If Apple can do it, I can do it. 

Tal Sholklapper:

So it's a little more complicated. I remember one of the chief engineers for one of the EV programs talked about it as the battery is the diva within the vehicle.

You got to make it, not make it safe, but it's really about figuring out how to make it, make that system work with your broader vehicle architecture. And if you treat it like a Diva and, pamper it too much, you're going to have too expensive a vehicle. That's going to have some, performance limitations.

And so it's really just understanding that technology and make it part of the whole vehicle itself. 

Roberto Baldwin:

And so let's talk a little bit about your partnership with Siemens. Siemens is a huge German company. I think most people don't quite understand what Siemens does, but they are in everything that I think Siemens even admits this.

They're like, we're so big, people don't quite know what we do. But let's talk about your partnership with Siemens. It was now it's earlier this year. What does it entail? What does it entail? How does it help with these Gigafactories? 

Tal Sholklapper:

Yeah. So we have a product and go to market partnership with Siemens.

Siemens beyond all their refrigerators and elevators and other things, one of their biggest businesses is actually in the automation and software around factories. And batteries is one of those key areas of focus for them from the top down. Really with. This partnership, we're really working to provide a complete solution to customers.

As you mentioned, this is new for companies and, outside of Asia, really building these factories at scale. And frankly, they're a little bit overwhelmed. What is, the hardware we need to get? What is the software? What are the different components?

And so with Siemens, we saw this opportunity to really create this, more of a complete solution that could be brought to customers and really make it easier for them to get Not only figure out what to get, but also get up and running a lot faster. So really excited about that partnership collaboration with Siemens. 

Roberto Baldwin:

Cool. And I think, It's the crazy thing is I don't think people realize is that all the individual machinery in a factory, it's a lot of it's made by different companies. Oh yeah. And those companies each have their own proprietary software.

And you try it, so you're having all these different machines that all speak a different language. And you're trying to figure out, how what went wrong? So you have to go to the machine number one and this, you gotta figure out this way and machine number two. And what Siemens does is it says, okay, we're going to allow you to talk to this machine and monitor this machine with its weird language and this machine it's weird language and this machine, and then give you the data.
And something that a person can figure out from a single console versus many consoles. 

Tal Sholklapper:

Yeah. So just creating that digital infrastructure for the factory itself. And that's where we come in, provide a lot of the battery domain specific insight and really help them understand where there's an actual issue with the battery cell itself and connect it to that piece of equipment, tell the operator where to look, where to go fix that problem so you can decrease that scrap rate. 

Roberto Baldwin:

Yeah, that's great. Because again, you're like something's wrong. Okay, we'll go to machine number F. Who knows how to fix machine number F? 

Tal Sholklapper: 

It really is hunt and peck right now in a lot of these factories.

Roberto Baldwin:

Yeah, this seems like a much a much more streamlined way. Because now you can figure out a problem almost immediately. And you can tweak that problem. You can keep track of that problem and you can, you can track the differences in the batteries that are coming off the line based on that one little tweak versus he went to a machine and turn a dial.

Tal Sholklapper:

That was a lot of the challenge the early gigafactory saw is they had some help especially as the Asian companies were setting up factories in North America or in Europe. In the first year you had those technicians coming over from Japan, Korea, China, and they just knew how the machine was supposed to feel when you touched it and the vibrations that doesn't work as soon as they go back to their mother country.

You need real software and tools to help create that the playbooks and, make that easier and more digital factory. 

Roberto Baldwin:

It's like the chief engineer for every Star Trek franchise. Yep. They were like, I just know how the machine works. I just know. And as soon as that person leaves the ship ah, everything's broken.

Everything's wrong. And so now you have a new partnership with AWS. So this is Amazon's cloud service. So what is that? What they mean do they. How, what is it and how does it help customers? 

Tal Sholklapper:

So AWS is the leading cloud service provider or hyperscaler sometimes that are known as, and yeah, what we're seeing with a lot of these factories as the West has really realized that we can't do it the old way we need to digitize and automate these factories.

A big part of that is where you're gonna do the computation, where you're gonna store the data, where you're gonna do the learning. And AWS is increasingly the leading supplier to many of these gigafactories and EV factories around the globe. And so really the partnership is. Pairing our solutions with their infrastructure to help these factories come up and get up running faster.

Increasingly, what we're seeing is that it is actually the CIOs or chief digital officers of organizations actually starting to lean in and get involved directly with implementation of these factories. And with that, they want to make sure that you have the right infrastructure from day one in place.

And so working with Amazon and their global sales teams, who's working with those chief digital officers were really able to come together and help them figure out the strategy for the digital layout for the factory and get them up and running very quickly. 

Roberto Baldwin:

So without AWS, would these companies have to build a, like essentially a data center or a server room in order to run the software? And of course, everything else that's going on. 

Tal Sholklapper: 

So a large giga factory in North America told me they spent over a hundred million dollars just setting up an early data center that quickly got flooded with the data and images and information from the factory. And it's. The scale that these companies like AWS provide in terms of managing and providing that kind of cloud infrastructure at scale is just dramatically improved versus trying to do it on your own.

And so it's the only way to really get up and running quickly and cost effectively to help monitor these factories. 

Roberto Baldwin:

Yeah, when you're talking about a hundred million dollars, a set of servers, you have cooling for all these servers, you have, things go down. It's a lot of just material and costs when you could just, I'm just going to pay Amazon to do this.

Exactly. A few years ago, there was an automaker had an issue with fires with their EVs with a Voltaiq system. And this is something people come up to me all the time. EVs catch on fire. And then of course I have to reiterate that cars, gas cars actually catch on fire at a higher percentage, but that's what on TV.

When something's new, it's a little terrifying, but with Voltaiq system, would you be able, for the most part what happened with that automaker's vehicle? Could that have been detected? 

Tal Sholklapper:

A hundred percent. So where we started the conversation talking about these scrap rates and bad cells that are caught in the factory, the reality is not all the bad cells are caught at that 30 day point at the end of production.

A lot of those cells actually make it into. What's called battery modules and packs that end up going into vehicles or going into batteries on the electric grid and those, they may not be, obviously defective right away, but that variability in the battery cells, some of those subtle issues, those heart murmurs, you could see in the 1st heartbeats you could identify those and they do end up leading to early returns and in worst cases fires in the vehicles.

And yeah. Really, what we try to look at is the earlier you could try to identify these things, the cheaper it's going to be. If you make sure it doesn't leave the factory, it doesn't have to go to your supplier who then reject it. And so make sure you have good cells coming out of the factory then make sure you have good modules and packs before they go into the vehicle and really try to limit those return rates. We do have this, the data exists. We are testing these things. The information is there. It's just broadly underutilized and not connected. It is literally going into that those individual machines, like you said.

And so having this digital infrastructure with cloud providers like AWS and others really allows you to start connecting the dots and helping identify and catching those issues. Before they cause problems in the field or before it leads to returns for customers. 

Roberto Baldwin:

And let's say something in it, something happens with the pack. We have a batch of packs. I don't know, maybe a day or two. You could track those through the life of the vehicle, or for the life of the actual pack or the actual cell from manufacturing to vehicle, to recycling, to back to, to back into manufacturing. 

Tal Sholklapper:

And I think that's the, without that digital infrastructure, the, a lot of the early EV recalls ended up being, model line wide, it was just everything that was produced in 2024 from the, or from this battery factory had to be recalled.

When you have that kind of digital infrastructure in place, you could pinpoint, Hey, we had a problem in the field with this battery or this vehicle, what's common in that, which where did that come from? Is it a specific, a lot of material that came in? It was the things that were produced over this day.

You could really start to be more fine grained and really not only pinpoint what you need to recall and fix. But also really guide yourself to improving and continue continuous improvement on the manufacturing process. 

Roberto Baldwin:

That helps automakers, it helps people who are putting things out into the grid because they can say, okay, these you know, 15 batteries are suspect versus these 15, 000 batteries are suspect.

Let's talk a little bit more about the grid. I, when we think about, when we think about batteries, we mostly think about EVs. For the grid, is it as, do you have a, just a stringent system to make sure that those battery packs are working? Are safe to go out into because the use case, it's not quite as advanced.

Essentially, EVs are charged and discharged so quickly all the time versus a battery on the grid, which is, charged a little slow, discharges a little slow, and maybe some days isn't used at all. Is it the same system for Voltaiq? 

Tal Sholklapper:

In a lot of ways, it's very similar. At the end of the day, we wanna make sure good batteries are going into whatever the end product is, whether it's EV or battery on the grid, or even a cell phone or power tool.

And so it's really, again, we've unfortunately seen as the. These larger energy storage projects on the grid have developed when there is one of those faults. It's a lot more expensive now because, instead of what used to be 10 megawatt hours with the batteries that could power, 100 homes or 1000 homes, it's now gigawatt hours worth of batteries, 1000 times larger.

And if there's a fire, it's going to be a lot more expensive. It's going to lead to a lot more disruption. And it's really, I think, from our view, similar as to, the, at the end of the day, we want to make all batteries, decrease the cost to make them by decreasing those scrap rates and then ensuring that you have only high-quality battery cells making it out into the products, whatever they may be.

Roberto Baldwin:

What do you think needs to change to help change the public's perception about batteries? What needs to happen? Do you think it just needs, we just need a nice lull of fewer and fewer incidents with batteries. Is it education from the government?

Is it education from companies?

Is it all three? What do you think needs to happen for those who are still a little, wary of batteries for a variety of reasons? 

Tal Sholklapper:

There's a couple of key things here. So one is. Just clear communication around some of these things, the just multiple back and forths of we don't know what to do with your vehicle, park it outside and you have to be clear with consumers and just tell them exactly what to do and what the path forward is.

But then on the other side, because we do have this digital infrastructure, our vehicles are connected devices. Now our factories are connected. We have the ability to look at these early signals of, those heart murmurs in the battery and it's on us to really create the infrastructure to identify and catch these things and remediate them before they cause that problem in the consumer's hand, whether it's, it is a fire or even just, the vehicle won't start in a certain day, it's that, that data is there and we.

We can and should really deal with it proactively to help catch those problems before it shows up in consumer's hands. 

Roberto Baldwin:

And so now the big question, we're going to need to increase battery production in this country to meet the needs of EVs, the grid, our phones, literally everything has a battery in it at this point on a daily basis.

As do you with looking at the current rate of battery production that's coming to the United States. Do you think we can pull it off? Are we in a good spot? Are we, where do you think we need more gigafactories or do we need, or the rate that we're building right now? Should we be okay? 

Tal Sholklapper:

Yeah. So I think as we saw there was all this News out there about the slowdown in EVs, the market is actually still growing. We're seeing now the reports from Q1, Q2, first half of this year. The market has continued to expand. We're seeing record deployments of batteries on the electric grid, and that's going to increase with the increased renewables.

And just transparently, you look at the costs in the market, the economics around building a new coal power plant versus renewables and a battery, it's much cheaper now to put out a battery. Battery and renewables. It is much cheaper for a commercial vehicle fleet to implement batteries and electric vehicles.

And so This is coming. Economics are going to drive it that way. That said, I think the, this learning this, we're this like early phase here where companies do need to figure out how to do this, how to build the operations, how to put in the right least right systems, how to train their staff. And yeah, I'm torn.

I know we need this, and we want to accelerate it faster and faster. But the reality is there's going to be this learning phase and, we don't want to rush that. So I think we're at about the right pace. Maybe a little bit more aggressive would be nice, but, excited to see just over the next five years, as we talked about beginning, just starting to see that really start to compound and accelerate over time here.

Roberto Baldwin:

Cool. I think it'd be great. We're getting smarter at building batteries, which I think, it's going to make the future batteries just so much better and then. I think a lot of the sort of fear of batteries will probably go away. It's like the fear of cell phones, back to the cell phone analogy. Initially no one, everyone made fun of the people with cell phones. And now we're all walking around with little computers in our pockets. 

Tal Sholklapper:

And we're all, it comes down to the batteries, this whole, digital transformation that the world has seen from the internet to our laptops and devices and AI now it's all powered by batteries.

So just excited to be helping support that's, fundamental technology that's going to. Help further drive that, that digital transformation. 

Roberto Baldwin:

Thank you so much for talking with me today, Tal. Check out Voltaiq and the work they're doing. I've talked to them a bunch of times and it is it's actually quite impressive. And it seems like something someone should have thought of before. 

Tal Sholklapper:

Thank you, Roberto and SAE. Thanks for having us on.

Roberto Baldwin:

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