Ten years ago, when Robert Bagheri founded Sakuu, he identified a fundamental stagnation within the battery manufacturing industry: a profound lack of agility. This observation, he contends, has hampered progress and limited the industry’s capacity to adapt to evolving demands and supply chain shifts. Sakuu’s ambitious mission is to fundamentally alter this paradigm, ushering in an era of more sustainable, cost-effective, and domestically produced batteries, with a particular focus on bringing manufacturing back to the United States. In an exclusive interview with Chief Executive, Bagheri detailed Sakuu’s innovative 3D manufacturing processes, highlighting their potential to not only enhance battery safety and performance but also to reshape the global energy storage landscape.
The Stagnation of Traditional Battery Production
Bagheri’s critique of the current state of battery manufacturing is stark. "The process has changed very little in the past 30 years, and factories today can’t keep pace with new value propositions and/or changes in the battery supply chain," he stated. This inertia, he explains, poses a significant hurdle for the rapid advancement and widespread adoption of next-generation battery technologies. Traditional manufacturing methods, often deeply entrenched and capital-intensive, struggle to accommodate the swift evolution of battery chemistries and designs. The cost and time required to retool existing facilities for new innovations can be prohibitive, thereby stifling progress and leading to significant resource wastage.
The implications of this inflexibility are far-reaching. The performance and sustainability of critical technologies such as electric vehicles (EVs), advanced medical devices, consumer electronics, and defense systems are directly tethered to the capabilities of their power sources. Limitations in battery weight, the environmental and health hazards associated with current manufacturing processes, and the global reliance on restricted supply chains all contribute to a bottleneck in technological progress. Sakuu’s approach directly addresses these challenges by reimagining the manufacturing process itself.
Sakuu’s 3D Manufacturing: A Paradigm Shift Towards Safety and Sustainability
At the core of Sakuu’s innovation lies its proprietary 3D manufacturing technology, exemplified by its Kavian Manufacturing Platform. This platform is designed to produce batteries, electrodes, and supercapacitors with a focus on enhanced safety and reduced environmental impact. Unlike conventional methods that often involve wet processes and hazardous solvents, Sakuu’s dry printing technique offers a cleaner, more efficient, and significantly safer alternative.
"At Sakuu, we are transforming manufacturing to power a more sustainable future and bring production home, wherever home may be for various markets," Bagheri emphasized. The company provides commercial-scale printing equipment and technologies tailored for manufacturers producing components for AI-focused data centers and other high-demand sectors. This strategic focus on AI underscores the growing need for robust, reliable, and high-capacity energy storage solutions to power the computational demands of the future.
A key advantage of Sakuu’s Kavian platform is its ability to produce electrodes in a single, integrated dry-printing process. This eliminates the need for the complex and resource-intensive steps associated with traditional solvent-based methods. The result is a significantly reduced manufacturing footprint, lower production costs, and a diminished environmental impact. Sakuu boasts an impressive portfolio of 113 patents in material, process, and manufacturing, complemented by over 130 trade secrets covering critical chemistry and process intellectual property, underscoring the depth of their technological advancements.
Enhancing Battery Safety Through Novel Architecture and Manufacturing
One of the most significant breakthroughs facilitated by Sakuu’s manufacturing process is the dramatic improvement in battery safety. Traditional lithium-ion battery cells, particularly those utilizing polymeric current collectors and composite conductive materials, can be susceptible to thermal runaway and explosive fires due to internal short circuits. While the underlying architecture for safer batteries exists, conventional manufacturing methods have historically been unable to support their mass production economically.
Sakuu’s multi-material dry printing process, however, makes these inherently safer battery designs economically viable. By altering the battery cell architecture and employing Sakuu’s manufacturing platform, energy from a short circuit can dissipate over hours without igniting, preventing catastrophic thermal events. This innovation holds profound implications for the widespread deployment of battery energy storage systems, potentially alleviating public concerns and simplifying regulatory approval processes for new installations.
"Changing the way lithium-ion batteries are manufactured also makes them even safer and virtually eliminates the possibility of catastrophic heat production resulting in a fire," Bagheri explained. He further elaborated on the architectural shift: "Lithium-ion battery cells made with composite conductive materials—or polymeric current collectors—are built with a different architecture so that when there is a short, the energy dissipates over the course of hours without ignition leading to a thermal event." This advancement not only enhances safety but also promises significant improvements in energy density, allowing batteries to store more power within the same or smaller volume.
Disrupting the Storage Market with Emerging Lithium Battery Technologies
The implications of these advancements extend far beyond individual battery cells. The enhanced safety profile offered by Sakuu’s technology stands to revolutionize the entire battery energy storage system (BESS) market. Facilities housing these advanced batteries can be designed with reduced risk profiles, potentially allowing for more flexible siting, less stringent safety protocols, and ultimately, lower construction costs and shorter development timelines. This could significantly accelerate the deployment of renewable energy storage solutions, a critical component in the transition to a decarbonized energy grid.
However, Bagheri acknowledges the inherent challenges in introducing disruptive technologies. "Battling inertia to adopt new ways of doing things is always a hurdle. There’s been some industry skepticism around the appropriateness of dry printing lithium-ion battery electrodes, especially the cathode. Can it be trusted to produce a battery that consistently meets or exceeds performance of the ones manufactured using a wet process, and be done cost-effectively and at scale?"
Sakuu has meticulously addressed these concerns through rigorous validation. The Kavian platform is engineered to accommodate a wide array of active materials, enabling manufacturers to process current, widely used chemistries while remaining adaptable to future innovations. The company has demonstrated the efficacy of its dry-printed electrodes in full cells across various materials. Notably, a lithium-ion battery cell with a fully dry-printed nickel-cobalt-manganese (NCM) cathode achieved an unprecedented 4,412 charge cycles before dropping below 80 percent energy retention—the benchmark for EV battery health. This performance far surpasses that of typical NCM battery cells, which often cycle around 2,000 times before reaching the same viability threshold. Crucially, this was not an isolated "hero" cell but was achieved through batch processing, underscoring the reliability and scalability of Sakuu’s technology.
The Future of Battery Manufacturing: Sakuu’s Vision
Sakuu’s ultimate objective is for its Kavian platform to become the de facto global standard for battery manufacturing. The company is actively engaged in partnering with industry leaders to establish state-of-the-art gigafactories capable of producing safe, long-lasting, and high-performance sustainable batteries and supercapacitors at the scale required to support the "electrification of everything" in the AI era. Beyond large-scale grid storage and EV applications, Sakuu is also developing smaller battery packs for mobility solutions and non-grid storage for industrial, telecommunications, and data center applications.
Furthermore, Sakuu envisions a future where batteries are not confined to discrete, box-like energy storage devices. The flexibility of the Kavian platform allows for batteries to be printed into virtually any shape, molded, and seamlessly integrated into the very structure of the devices they power. This revolutionary approach can lead to significant weight reductions and cost savings, while also enabling entirely new product designs that are no longer dictated by the limitations of conventional battery form factors. Manufacturers can now test and refine novel battery designs and materials tailored to the precise size, shape, and specifications of their products, rather than adapting their products to fit existing battery limitations.
Whether it’s powering the next generation of electric vehicles, stabilizing the global energy grid, or enabling the immense computational power required by AI data centers, Sakuu is positioned to empower energy innovators and battery technology leaders to sustainably dry print the energy storage solutions of the future, in any form factor imaginable. Their commitment to innovation, safety, and domestic manufacturing signals a pivotal shift in an industry long overdue for transformation. The company’s proactive approach to addressing supply chain vulnerabilities and environmental concerns through advanced manufacturing techniques places them at the forefront of the global energy transition.
