Exclusive: ‘I’ve seen this movie before’: A Michigan-raised ex-Tesla exec raises $45 million to break China’s grip on batteries

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Steven Prast is old enough to remember when a mobile phone came in a bag. It was too heavy to carry around, so most people mounted it in the car. Prast argued in a Zoom interview with Fortune that what eventually shrank it into something you wear on your wrist was more the battery than the transistor, holding up his own phone as proof. “What took us from that to this is the battery,” said Prast, a former Tesla manufacturing leader who is now chief operating officer of the battery-materials startup Holyvolt. By his reckoning, lithium-ion technology is at best 20% of the way through its maturity curve, maybe 10% by conservative estimates. The West won’t win the rest of that curve, he said, by fighting with China over the part that’s already finished. “We will not be able to out-China China on the battlefield that China has defined,” Prast said. “They’re the world champions at being China.” Holyvolt is putting $45 million behind the alternative, all in equity. The Stockholm-based…

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