Sodium-ion battery startup Natron ceased operations this week, ending the company’s twelve-year quest to commercialize its technology in the United States.
The company had twenty-five million dollars worth of orders lined up for its Michigan factory. However, it could not deliver them without first obtaining UL certification, a process that often spans several months. According to reports, Natron investors balked at releasing more funds, leaving the startup facing a severe cash crunch.
Natron’s primary shareholder, Sherwood Partners, attempted to sell its stake but found no buyers. As a result, the company is now being liquidated. All but a small number of employees have been laid off; the remaining staff will oversee the wind-down of operations.
The closure exemplifies the challenges of manufacturing batteries without consistent industrial policies. The road from startup to gigafactory often takes a decade or more, a journey that lasts longer than most business cycles and certainly longer than most investor fads.
Natron is being carved up through a process known as an assignment for the benefit of creditors. This alternative to Chapter 7 bankruptcy could result in a speedy and quiet sale of assets that forgoes formal court proceedings.
Just one year ago, the company announced plans to build a much larger, one-point-four billion dollar sodium-ion battery factory in North Carolina. The facility was projected to be capable of producing gigawatt-hours worth of cells per year and creating as many as one thousand jobs. Natron had focused on stationary storage and data center customers, markets where sodium ion’s lower energy density is less of a concern.
While sodium-ion batteries have the potential to be significantly cheaper than lithium-ion competitors due to sodium’s abundance, their potential has been undercut by a lithium price war in China. Over the last two and a half years, the price of lithium carbonate has cratered, dropping ninety percent.
Natron is only the latest casualty in a string of recent attempts to manufacture large quantities of batteries outside of Asia. In June, Oregon-based Powin filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after it failed to find a non-Chinese supplier of lithium-iron-phosphate cells, which it used to assemble grid-scale batteries.
Earlier this year, Swedish battery manufacturer Northvolt also filed for bankruptcy in its home country, ending the journey for Europe’s best chance at a homegrown competitor. The company was reportedly burning through one hundred million dollars a month as it struggled to master large-scale manufacturing. BMW canceled a two billion dollar contract in June 2024 because of Northvolt’s inability to deliver.
These failures highlight the immense difficulty of building battery companies outside Asia, a region that has developed mature supply chains and companies with vast expertise over decades. If the United States or Europe is to succeed in creating domestic challengers to the Asian battery giants, it will require sustained government support for a decade or more, not the inconsistent policies of the last fifteen years. Given political realities, joint ventures with established companies like Panasonic, LG Energy Solution, and SK Innovation are more likely to succeed. For the foreseeable future, the West’s best chance at domestic battery manufacturing still runs through Asia.