Welcome to the 115th edition of Deep Tech Catalyst, the educational channel from The Scenarionist where science meets venture!
On this week’s episode of Deep Tech Catalyst, I sat down with Richard Wang, Founder & former CEO of Cuberg, a Deep Tech company commercializing next-generation battery technology for electric mobility that was acquired by Northvolt in 2021, and today Co-founder & CEO of Voya Energy.
In our conversation, we unpacked Cuberg’s entire journey, from the early shift from technology push to market pull to financing a battery company outside the standard VC path and ultimately building toward a successful strategic exit.
Key takeaways from the episode:
🎯 The Best First Market Is Rarely the Biggest One
The real opportunity lies in niche markets where technical requirements are non-obvious, willingness to pay is high, and the product can create meaningful value before cost competitiveness is fully mature.
🤝 Strategic Investors Can Solve More Than a Funding Problem
When prospective customers become strategic backers, commercial validation and financing stop being separate challenges and start reinforcing each other.
🏭 A Capital-Light Model Can Extend Survival and Increase Optionality
Avoiding premature investment in internal manufacturing infrastructure, relying on external prototyping partners, and combining equity with grants and other non-dilutive funding can make the difference between stalling in “the valley of death” and reaching the next stage of technical maturity.
📈 The CEO’s First Job Is to Keep the Company Alive
Fundraising, customer conversations, strategic partnerships, and timing all matter more than founders often expect. In Deep Tech, survival is not a side effect of progress, it is the condition that makes progress possible.
BEYOND THE CONVERSATION — STRATEGIC INSIGHTS FROM THE EPISODE
Moving Beyond Technology Push to Find a Real Commercial Wedge
The story of Cuberg did not begin with a market-first insight.
It began in a far more familiar Deep Tech pattern: a promising technology emerging from academic research, accompanied by the belief that its technical novelty could become the basis of a new venture.
The original foundation came from PhD work on solid-state batteries.
The underlying concept was compelling: instead of relying on the liquid electrolyte used in conventional batteries, the architecture replaced that internal medium with a solid material capable of conducting lithium ions.
From a scientific standpoint, it was easy to see why this looked exciting. Solid-state batteries had long been associated with the possibility of meaningful advances in safety, performance, and next-generation battery design.
As a starting point for a company, it had all the features that often attract a technical founder: a differentiated concept, strong academic roots, and a clear sense of being attached to a major future trend.
But after roughly a year of trying to build around that original technology, it became clear that scientific interest and commercial logic were not the same thing.
The issue was that the specific technology did not make enough sense as a product platform, especially once the scale-up journey was taken seriously. Manufacturing complexity became a central problem.
When examined through the lens of what it would take to move from a laboratory result to a commercially viable battery product, the original approach looked much less compelling.
The pivot that changed the company’s trajectory
In 2016, the company pivoted away from its original solid-state approach and toward a fundamentally different path in advanced battery design.
That choice effectively reset the company.
Once the company stopped anchoring itself to the original technology, it also stopped being constrained by the assumptions that came with it.
That shift changed the company’s posture in a profound way.
Instead of beginning with a fixed technology and asking where it might fit, the company now had to think more openly about what different markets actually needed and which technical pathways could realistically serve those needs.
In other words, the pivot did not just change the product direction. It changed the logic of the company from technology push to market-driven problem solving.
Becoming technology-agnostic was critical.
Once it was no longer narrowly focused on a single technology, the company could evaluate opportunities with a different kind of discipline.
This is why the pivot stands out as one of the most constructive decisions in the company’s trajectory.
The business was no longer organized around proving that a scientific concept deserved a market. It was now trying to understand where unmet need could define the product itself.
Innovation became tied to usefulness, manufacturability, and strategic fit.
From the mainstream market to a single, clearly defined niche
Another turning point came through a less obvious interaction, when an oil and gas company working on high-temperature battery applications reached out to explore a potential collaboration.
What began as a potential partnership quickly became far more important than that. It created the setting in which the company could begin discovering what a genuinely useful commercial wedge might look like.
The customer’s application was highly specific.
Batteries were being used downhole, alongside drilling equipment, to power sensors and electronics deep inside the well. The environment was extremely harsh.
Under those conditions, the available battery option was a single-use lithium metal battery. Once consumed, it had to be discarded and replaced. That imposed both significant cost and significant operational friction on the customer.
What mattered was not just that the problem was painful. It was that the requirements were different from the assumptions a battery researcher would normally carry from mainstream markets.
In traditional thinking, especially in automotive, battery quality is tied to highly demanding metrics such as very long cycle life. A thousand cycles might be treated as a minimum threshold for commercial relevance.
But in this oil and gas application, that model did not apply.
For a customer already relying on a disposable battery, the value threshold looked completely different. If a rechargeable battery could survive only ten cycles, that would already represent an order-of-magnitude improvement over the status quo.
That is the kind of insight that is easy to miss if a company remains trapped inside the assumptions of large, visible markets.
It showed that some early commercial opportunities in Deep Tech may come not from the biggest or most obvious market, but from a market whose requirements are unusual enough that an emerging technology can already solve the problem well enough to matter.
In this case, the harsh thermal environment was challenging, but the low cycle-life requirement made the problem much more tractable than automotive.
The opportunity was difficult in one dimension and forgiving in another. That kind of asymmetry is exactly what can create a viable beachhead.
That is where a real value proposition began to form. Not through claims about next-generation batteries, but through close engagement with a customer whose non-obvious constraints revealed a commercially credible entry point.
The niche looked strange by conventional standards. Precisely for that reason, it was promising.
Matching Markets to Company Stage, Adoption Speed, and Strategic Fit
In the company’s early commercial thinking, one of the central questions was not simply which market was largest, but which market made sense at a given stage of development.
Automotive was highly cost-sensitive, with a high threshold for entry in terms of manufacturing maturity, reliability, and price competitiveness. For a young battery company, those conditions were difficult to meet early on.
That led to a different go-to-market logic. Rather than starting from the size of the addressable market, the company began looking at the relationship between a given application and its current position on the cost curve.
The operative question became:
“Which customers are able and willing to pay for the performance the technology can deliver now, rather than the performance it may one day deliver at scale?”
Markets were therefore evaluated not only by size or visibility, but by how well they matched the company’s stage of maturity.
From that perspective, automotive looked less like an initial commercial destination and more like a later one.
False starts, dead ends, and what became clear
As the company moved away from obvious market assumptions, it explored several possible beachheads.
Some appeared promising at first but turned out to be less attractive once the commercial dynamics became clearer.
That process helped refine what made an early market viable. Medical devices offer a good example.
On the surface, the segment looked attractive. Performance mattered, reliability mattered, and the battery often represented only a small share of the value of the overall product.
By that logic, a better battery seemed likely to command a premium. The company even received its first purchase order for samples in that segment, which made the opportunity look concrete.
But over time, the fit appeared more limited.
Customers were interested in performance, yet they were also highly risk-averse. Regulation added another layer of caution, and qualification cycles were long.
As a result, the path from technical interest to meaningful adoption was slow. The issue was not that the market lacked value, but that its pace did not align especially well with what the company needed at that moment.
That experience made the screening logic more specific. Willingness to pay remained important, but it was no longer enough on its own.
The company also had to consider how quickly a market could adopt, how burdensome qualification would be, and whether the commercial path was likely to produce usable feedback, revenue, or both within a reasonable timeframe.
Seen that way, the false starts helped clarify that an early beachhead market had to combine several conditions at once: economic willingness, operational accessibility, and a purchasing dynamic compatible with the company’s stage.
How different sectors serve different stages of the journey
As these experiences accumulated, market selection became less about finding one perfect industry and more about understanding what different sectors could contribute at different moments in the company’s development.
That mattered especially in batteries, where a single technology can potentially serve multiple end markets.
The company did not treat all markets as interchangeable, nor did it assume that one sector had to perform every function. Instead, different segments began to play different roles.
Some sectors were useful because they could support development.
Manned aviation fit that pattern. It had a high willingness to pay and, just as importantly, customers who were prepared to fund development over a longer horizon.
For a company still advancing the technology, that kind of relationship could be valuable even if broad commercialization remained slower.
Other sectors were useful for a different reason: they could move more quickly once a solution existed.
Drone applications fit into that category. They may not have offered the same type of long-term development support as larger aviation players, but they were easier to access and faster to commercialize into.
In that sense, they were useful in translating technical capability into market validation.
Over time, this led to a more staged view of go-to-market. Some sectors were more helpful in financing learning and development. Others were more useful in creating early commercial proof.
Larger and more cost-sensitive markets became more relevant later, as the company’s cost structure and technical maturity improved.
That is how the company’s market logic evolved.
The objective was not to identify one market and remain fixed on it forever, nor to pursue every possible application in parallel.
It was to match markets to stage: development-oriented sectors when the technology still needed to mature, faster-moving sectors when commercial proof mattered most, and broader markets only when the economics made them plausible.
Financing a Battery Startup Without Following the Standard VC Script
As the company’s financing strategy took shape, one of the underlying observations was that the standard venture-backed startup model was a poor fit.
Battery companies tend to face high barriers to entry, significant capital requirements, and long development timelines. Moving from technical promise to commercial scale can take longer than many traditional venture investors are set up to support.
That mismatch influenced the company’s approach from early on.
Rather than building around the expectations of a conventional VC, it chose to pursue a financing path that was more compatible with the pace and economics of the sector.
In practice, that meant operating with tighter spending discipline and a more constrained capital base, but also with investor expectations that were closer to the actual development cycle of the business.
Turning customers into strategic investors
Once traditional VC was no longer treated as the default, the company’s fundraising logic shifted toward strategic capital. In particular, it raised from corporates that could plausibly become users of the technology themselves.
That changed the financing process in an important way.
In a conventional startup model, raising capital and proving commercial demand are often treated as separate challenges.
Here, the two moved closer together. If the investor was also a prospective customer, then fundraising depended more on showing that the technology could solve a real problem for a known buyer.
The early oil and gas partner illustrates this clearly.
The customer already understood the operational problem. The company’s task was to show that the battery technology could address it in a meaningful way.
If that case was persuasive, the customer had a reason both to work with the company and to invest in its progress.
A similar pattern later appeared with Boeing.
By the time Boeing led the seed round, the relationship was not simply financial. It reflected a view that the technology addressed a real need in aviation and could become strategically useful in that context.
In that sense, the capital was closely tied to real commercial validation.
This kind of alignment depended on choosing the right strategic counterparties.
Another important takeaway is that the strongest fit often came from downstream users—companies whose businesses could benefit directly if the technology worked.
Their incentives were easier to understand, and the relationship was more clearly tied to a concrete need.
Pricing from cost structure and delivered value
The same logic shaped how pricing was approached.
On one side, the company needed a bottom-up view of cost: bill of materials, manufacturing assumptions, expected learning curves, and how costs might evolve with scale.
Without that, pricing would quickly lose contact with what the business could realistically support.
But cost was only part of the picture. The other side was the value created for the customer.
In markets like aviation, battery performance could directly affect the economics of the end product.
If improved performance allowed an aircraft to fly farther, carry more, or operate more productively, then the value delivered could exceed the incremental cost of the battery by a wide margin. That opened up room for premium pricing.
Pricing therefore sat between two perspectives: what the battery could cost over time, and what better performance was worth to the customer.
The relevant benchmark was not simply the incumbent battery price, but the economic effect of using a better one.
Crossing the Valley of Death With a Capital-Light Model
One of the company’s key operating choices was not to build an internal battery prototyping line too early.
The technical process is complex, manufacturing quality matters, and there is often a strong instinct to internalize as much as possible.
At the same time, doing so would also have required major capital investment at a stage when the company was still proving out both the technology and the commercial path.
Instead, the company chose to be selective about what it owned. Rather than building a full prototyping capability in-house, it worked with external manufacturing partners that already had the relevant equipment.
The first efforts involved prototyping labs in the United States. Later, the company moved to a more sophisticated partner in China that could produce higher-quality samples.
This made the capital-light approach very concrete.
The goal was not to avoid technical development, but to preserve scarce capital by outsourcing expensive capabilities when that did not compromise the core of the business.
What mattered most was not owning a prototyping line, but being able to design, test, refine, and validate advanced battery concepts in a commercially relevant way.
That also affected how the company moved through the early stages of development. In deep tech, the difficulty is often not only the science itself, but the cost of reaching a demonstrable product.
By avoiding a large infrastructure build too early, the company reduced some of that pressure and kept more flexibility as it advanced.
The timeline from early funding to advanced prototypes
That operating model was supported by a funding path that developed in stages rather than through one large early raise.
In 2016, the company raised $900,000 in pre-seed capital from the oil and gas partner that had helped shape its original commercial direction. That funding supported a small team and early lab-stage technical development.
Alongside that, the company secured roughly $500,000 in Department of Energy support through a fellowship-related program. Together, those sources provided around $1.5 million across 2016 and 2017, enough to sustain the first phase of development and continue building the technical base.
The next step came in early 2018, when Boeing led a $2 million seed round.
With that capital, the team grew and the work moved beyond the earliest research stage.
In 2019, the company added another roughly $1.5 million in grant funding, bringing total new capital across 2018 and 2019 to approximately $3.5 million. By then, the team had grown to around twelve or thirteen people.
During that period, the company also moved from very early laboratory work toward prototypes, first through U.S. labs and later through the Chinese manufacturing partner.
The shift was not only financial but technical: it brought the company closer to a form factor and performance level that customers could begin to evaluate more directly.
When the company nearly ran out of cash
Even with that discipline, the path remained fragile. In mid-2019, the company came close to running out of money, with only a short amount of runway left. What helped bridge that moment was a combination of grant funding and additional support from angel investors.
A California Energy Commission grant arrived at a critical time. But that timing was only possible because the company had applied roughly a year earlier.
That reflected an important feature of non-dilutive funding: it could be highly valuable, but it operated on a much longer cycle than equity. Applications had to be made well in advance, often without knowing whether the funds would arrive when needed.
That made grants less a reactive source of capital than a long-cycle pipeline that had to be managed continuously.
Even after an award was secured, there could still be delays before funds became available, and reimbursement structures could create working-capital pressure.
For that reason, the company still needed more flexible capital from investors to absorb timing gaps and cover costs that grants would not reimburse.
Scaling Through Partnership, and CEO Focus
As the company moved beyond early prototypes, the question of scale became more concrete. In batteries, that inevitably brings manufacturing into focus.
A product may work, customer interest may be real, and early commercial signals may be encouraging, but those elements do not by themselves answer how production will happen at scale.
From relatively early on, the company did not assume that it should become a full battery manufacturer itself.
Building and financing a large manufacturing operation would have required a level of capital, operating capability, and organizational complexity that did not fit the company’s stage.
Manufacturing clearly mattered, but direct ownership of a factory did not appear to be the most practical objective.
The working assumption was that the technology would create more value if it could eventually be scaled within a larger manufacturing platform—one that already had the infrastructure, operational experience, and capital required for industrial production.
In that sense, the company’s role was not to recreate the entire battery manufacturing stack, but to develop the technology far enough that it became strategically valuable to a larger manufacturer.
That made the long-term path less about building an independent factory and more about reaching a point where integration with a larger industrial player would make sense.
Samples could still be produced through external partners, commercial relationships could still be built directly, and early validation could still happen without owning the full production system. But the route to scale pointed elsewhere.
The path to acquisition
The acquisition emerged gradually rather than through a predefined plan. The relationship with Northvolt began early, but at first there was no concrete discussion about a transaction.
By late 2019, the company was still focused on raising a Series A, and a strategic investment seemed more plausible than an outright acquisition.
What changed the situation was timing. As the financing process advanced, the opportunity for Northvolt became more time-sensitive, since a completed round would likely have changed both the company’s trajectory and the structure of any future deal.
That became a major forcing function in pushing the conversation toward acquisition.
What followed was a more intensive process of engagement and diligence in early 2020. In that sense, the transaction grew out of an existing relationship, a fundraising process already underway, and a moment in which independent financing and strategic acquisition became parallel paths.
Strategic investors, negotiation, and IP
There is a strong takeaway in how the company approached strategic investors.
The most relevant partners were usually downstream companies—potential users of the technology rather than peers or adjacent suppliers.
That created a clearer form of alignment, since the strategic investor’s interest was tied to a problem it might eventually solve through the startup’s product.
Those relationships also tended to revolve less around conventional venture questions and more around commercial terms.
Discussions were more likely to involve issues such as future pricing, preferred access, or exclusivity in a specific application.
In the company’s case, for example, the oil and gas partner received exclusivity for its own market segment, which was narrow enough that the concession did not significantly constrain the broader business.
The company’s experience also shaped the founder’s view on confidentiality and IP concerns.
Early technical founders often worry that large corporates will copy what they are shown. The view here was more selective. With downstream customers, that concern appeared limited, since battery development was not their core business. In those cases, openness could support trust and momentum.
With companies much closer to the same part of the value chain and had the technical ability to replicate the work, more caution seemed justified.
Taken together, these choices formed a fairly consistent pattern.
Scale was approached through strategic fit rather than internal manufacturing ownership.
The acquisition emerged through relationship-building and timing rather than through a pre-set exit plan.
The CEO role centered heavily on keeping the company financed and operational.
And strategic negotiations were handled with an emphasis on relevance, proportionality, and the specific incentives of each counterparty.
