Lithium-Ion Battery Maker Sakti3 Gets $4.2 Million from GM, Itochu to Speed Up Commercialization Efforts

Sakti3, an Ann Arbor, MI-based lithium-ion battery maker, announced today that it has brought in $4.2 million from General Motors Ventures and Itochu Technology Ventures to put toward the manufacturing and commercialization of its battery cells.

Sakti3 was co-founded by Ann Marie Sastry, a University of Michigan engineering professor, in 2007, and is working on high performance solid state batteries. Last year, Sakti3 entered an agreement with GM to study vehicle integration challenges from high-tech batteries.

“These investments by General Motors Ventures and Itochu Technology Ventures bring us not only capital, but partnerships that will speed our commercialization efforts,” CEO Sastry (also a Detroit Xconomist) said in the company announcement of the deal today.

The newest financing brings the company’s funding pot to more than $16 million, which includes a $7 million Series B round Sakti3 wrapped up this spring, from Menlo Park, CA-based Khosla Ventures and Beringea, Michigan’s largest venture capital firm. The startup has also received funding from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, earning it the designation as a Michigan Center of Energy Excellence, and has gotten tax incentives at the state level.

Author: Erin Kutz

Erin Kutz has a background in covering business, politics and general news. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Boston University. Erin previously worked in the Boston bureau of Reuters, where she wrote articles on the investment management and mutual fund industries. While in college, she researched for USA Today reporter Jayne O’Donnell’s book, Gen Buy: How Tweens, Teens and Twenty-Somethings Are Revolutionizing Retail. She also spent a semester in Washington, DC, reporting Capitol Hill stories as a correspondent for two Connecticut newspapers and interning in the Money section of USA Today, where she assisted with coverage on the retail and small business beats. Erin got her first taste of reporting at Boston University’s independent student newspaper, as a city section reporter and fact checker and editor of the paper’s weekly business section.