General Motors is leading a $60 million Series B financing round in Mitra Chem, a Silicon Valley-based, AI-enabled battery materials innovator. The company’s AI-powered platform and advanced research and development facility in Mountain View, California, will help accelerate GM’s commercialization of affordable electric vehicle batteries.
GM and Mitra Chem will develop advanced iron-based cathode active materials (CAM), like lithium manganese iron phosphate (LMFP), to power affordable and accessible EV batteries compatible with GM’s EV propulsion architecture, the Ultium Platform. GM’s funding will help Mitra Chem to scale its current operations and to expedite their novel battery materials formulation to market.
Mitra Chem’s battery R&D facility can simulate, synthesize and test thousands of cathode designs monthly, ranging in size from grams to kilograms. These processes drive significantly shortened learning cycles, enabling shorter time to market for new battery cell formulas.
An “atoms-to-tons acceleration platform” powers Mitra Chem’s lab, using simulations and physics-informed machine learning models to accelerate formulation discovery, cathode synthesis optimization, cell-lifetime evaluation and process scale-up. The in-house cloud platform, purpose-built for battery cathode development, automates data ingestion across diverse synthesis, material characterization, cell prototyping, and standardized analyses and visualizations.
