The tech-trailblazer who built a better and safer battery for all — TFN

Emilie Bodoin’s satisfaction was seen as she walked on to the stage to gather the American Chemical Society’s 2025 Inexperienced Chemistry Problem Award on behalf of Pure Lithium, a disruptive battery know-how firm that she based simply six years in the past.

Proud however perhaps not shocked. Emilie and her labor of affection Pure Lithium has been on a roll of late, choosing up awards and accolades and reaching key milestones within the improvement of what she believes will likely be a transformative battery innovation.

Emilie would be the first to heap reward on the scientists and technicians who helped make Pure Lithium what it’s immediately, however as Chairman, CEO and holder of a number of battery know-how patents, she is clearly the driving drive behind the corporate’s success.

So who got here first, the scientist or the tech startup entrepreneur? Emilie would say it began with an nearly obsessive curiosity.

Inception of the thought 

From a younger age in her native Detroit, Emilie’s driving drive was fixing probably the most advanced issues she may discover and setting herself bold objectives. Whereas which will look like a pure street to scientific analysis, Emilie handed via many phases as many younger individuals do. She
says she first wished to be an astronaut, however that modified after she watched the House Shuttle Challenger blow up on tv as a younger woman. As a substitute, the tragedy helped construct her curiosity in problem-solving. How may such a minor drawback end in such a tragic lack of life? Later, Emilie then wished to be a human rights lawyer (“Madeleine Albright,” in her personal phrases), then a physicist – something that would current her with issues too large for others to unravel. 

After attending Carnegie-Mellon College, Emilie started her skilled profession within the difficult sector of company finance, studying the ropes of how companies function and gaining expertise that might serve her when she began her personal enterprise.  Emilie labored in a number of finance roles in New York Metropolis, serving latterly because the Chief Know-how Officer for G.C. Andersen Companions, a boutique funding financial institution.

However her love for science and fixing issues continued to name her. She moved on to Argonne Nationwide Laboratory in Illinois to work as Principal Investigator on a lithium metallic manufacturing undertaking. It was right here that she started to actually deal with the potential of lithium metallic – lengthy thought-about the ‘holy grail’ of power storage – and was astounded {that a} lithium metallic battery had by no means been efficiently commercialised.

The way to construct an organization

Emilie took the leap, and based Pure Lithium in late 2019. Then, in 2020, on the top of the COVID-19 pandemic, she started elevating her firm’s profitable Sequence A funding spherical.

Armed along with her scientific background and having already obtained backing from billionaire Robert Friedland, Emilie steamed forward with Pure Lithium’s R&D section to learn the way to unlock the total potential of lithium metallic.

After recruiting a world-class analysis and improvement staff, Emilie labored on one of many greatest obstacles. Lithium metallic is notoriously costly and energy-intensive to provide; it’s simply broken in transportation and its manufacturing depends on intercontinental provide chains. You might construct a lithium-metal battery however it might value a whole lot, if not hundreds, of {dollars} per unit.

The breakthrough was Pure Lithium’s proprietary Brine to Battery know-how, which allowed the corporate to provide cheap, high-purity lithium metallic and electrodeposit it onto a copper plate to create the battery anode in a single step. This was a large financial savings in value, time and power, but it surely was nonetheless solely a part of the battery. Emilie reached out to Nobel Laureate Sir M. Stanley Wittingham to invent the opposite key part of the battery, the cathode. After experimenting with completely different supplies, the pair got here up with the thought of utilizing a vanadium cathode, which proved to be the right match.

Combining these two applied sciences enabled the creation of a battery that might be constructed with out counting on far-flung international provide chains for supplies similar to graphite, nickel, cobalt or manganese. The 2 principal supplies, lithium brines and vanadium oxide, are available within the U.S. and are typically situated shut to one another in several components of the world.

Lastly Emilie had a lithium metallic battery that was outscoring the lithium-ion in each single metric, and he or she started arming herself and her firm with patents to guard her game-changing know-how. With the analysis and testing of the battery accomplished, Emilie has simply moved Pure Lithium to Chicago, the place she has additionally purchased a house, to start the prototype section of battery manufacturing on the way in which to full business manufacturing.

The way to be an inclusive chief

From her time in company finance, Emilie discovered that it’s one factor to invent a terrific new product, however one other to steer a staff of individuals and to foster an ethos of inclusivity and variety to spur innovation. As a lady in a historically male-dominated function, inclusivity and variety are of paramount significance to her. 

Emilie has surrounded herself at Pure Lithium with many robust and clever ladies, together with her firm’s director of battery engineering, director of company improvement, director of improvement, and lab supervisor. She additionally emphasises the significance of encouraging open communication at Pure Lithium. Emilie prides herself on guaranteeing that there are not any partitions up between her firm’s every day operations employees and scientific division, so that each one her staff are all the time updated on what’s going on all through the corporate. She ensures that each one of her staff are snug sufficient to see issues as alternatives for collaboration and success. 

This tradition of inclusivity and variety that Emilie has created at Pure Lithium is what continues to drive her firm towards full commercialisation of her game-changing battery know-how. 

Altering the sport

Emilie’s aim is to utterly supplant the lithium-ion battery, probably the most extensively used rechargeable battery on this planet proper now,  with one thing far more environment friendly and environmentally sound. Reaching that will likely be no small job, although, however Emilie doesn’t do small issues. She solves the issues that others really feel are unattainable.