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Apple Veteran Wins Gates’s Backing for Michigan Battery Startup

  • Our Next Energy says it can beat Tesla’s iron-based batteries
  • CEO calls nickel-cobalt batteries wrong foundation for cars

The Our Next Energy (ONE) Aries battery pack.

Source: Our Next Energy Inc.
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Amid a boom in electric-vehicle production and a race for innovations that improve these new cars’ range and cost, battery startup Our Next Energy saidBloomberg Terminal Monday it has raised $25 million in a fresh fundraising round.

The investment in ONE, as the company is known, was led by Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures. The year-old startup, based in Novi, Michigan, says it has engineered a way to eke out higher ranges from lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, a more stable but less powerful chemistry than the nickel-based batteries used by most automakers today.