As the world shifts towards sustainable energy, home battery solutions such as the Tesla Powerwall 2 are quickly becoming big business. And that’s exactly why two former Tesla employees are launching their very own home battery startup.
Called Northvolt, the new battery company is the brainchild of two ex-Tesla workers – and they weren’t exactly low-level employees, either. According to Electrek, the new startup was founded by Tesla’s former vice president of supply chain management, Peter Carlsson, along with Paolo Cerruti earlier this year.
The new startup has big plans: Northvolt is about to close its first range of major funding, and both Carlsson and Cerruti want to use it to build a Gigafactory. While Northvolt’s factory won’t actually be called that, it will still be capable of producing several gigawatt-hours (GWh) of energy storage a year – so it qualifies for Tesla’s made-up classification.
The investment will require $4 billion in total, but Northvolt is already on track, after receiving a seed round of $14 million and a first round that is aiming to bring in $118 million. Interestingly, some of that seed round includes investment from Vattenfall, Sweden’s largest electric utility.
According to a recent interview with Bloomberg, Northvolt will be hoping to net between $1.2 and $1.4 billion in the next round of investment, which should be enough to start building the Gigafactory in late 2018.
While the company seems to have a lot in common with Tesla right now, the location will be very different. In the same Bloomberg interview, Carlsson revealed the Northvolt Gigafactory will be based in Sweden, either at Vasteras – near Stockholm – or in Skelleftea, further north.
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