A Better Formula for Batteries

W hat you see here are batteries made using the startup Anthro Energy’s patented electrolytes being subjected to tests that are indeed… battering. 

Sliced with a bandsaw. Hammered with a nail. Pummeled with a drill press. 

(In the latter, the lithium-ion control bursts into flames dramatically, while the Anthro version stoically takes the pummeling, to little affect.) The technologist behind this advanced battery electrolyte is David Mackanic, PhD ’20, cofounder and CEO of Anthro Energy, a startup he began in 2020 and was later joined by cofounder and CTO Joe Papp. 

“Maybe we should start with how our battery is different,” begins Mackanic. Electrolyte is the technical term for what is colloquially called battery acid, he explains—the stuff your parents told you never to touch, and for good reason. 

“The battery acid inside the lithium-ion battery is extremely flammable. It’s very volatile. This electrolyte is toxic and dangerous, and also highly corrosive,” he says. 

Lithium-ion batteries in their current formulation sit at a midpoint between energy density and safety. If you add more oomph to the batteries, they become more dangerous; if you improve their safety, they weaken. 

“Anthro’s technology replaces the liquid electrolyte with a polymer electrolyte, which is kind of a stretchy elastic rubber material that goes inside the battery in place of the liquid. By replacing the liquid with this polymer, you’re able to improve the safety and lifecycle, and also enable the next-generation of higher energy-density batteries.”

The electrolyte’s nimble ruggedness has caught the attention of sectors spanning the military to electronic bike makers. What sets Anthro Energy apart is the company’s ability to slot directly into the assembly line of existing factories for lithium-ion batteries—the result of years of research and development with commercial partners. 

“We’re compatible with every battery chemistry, every battery shape and size,” says Mackanic, from the usual AAA to D, to custom-made batteries as small as a postage stamp and as large as a soda can. 

The Anthro team foresees that longer-lasting batteries, with fewer recalls, is one path to decreasing carbon emissions associated with manufacturing batteries. Meanwhile, lighter-weight, power-dense batteries can equate to more efficient electric cars and vehicles—given that energy storage is the crux to a more electric future.

“Our technology can help make most batteries better regardless of the application.” 

In 2024, the company raised $20 million in Series A funding and secured $43 million in grants and federal support to open the first U.S. owned and operated production facility for advanced electrolyte production, slated for Kentucky. In 2025, Anthro also opened a technology development facility in Alameda, California. 

“That’s a nice validation of our technology, and it is also exciting for a young company like us to have an opportunity to really scale-up,” he says. When complete, the facility will produce up to 25 gigawatt-hours’ worth of battery electrolytes.

The right ecosystem

Mackanic says he had been curious about entrepreneurship—that’s part of what drew him to Palo Alto—but he remembers the moment when he took the challenge seriously. As an Accel Innovation Scholar in 2019, he prepared a pitch deck to demonstrate how his academic research could be translated into a commercial product. 

Fern Mandelbaum, a lecturer in management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and teacher for the course, now called the Emerson Consequential Scholars Program, was vocal in her support. He recalls her saying: “David, you have to do this. You have to start this company. This technology is amazing.” 

Meanwhile, he was lead author for an academic paper in Nature Communications that led to collaborators who wanted to test the electrolyte concept for product integration. The name of the paper was Decoupling of mechanical properties and ionic conductivity in supramolecular lithium-ion conductors, or as he puts it more simply: “That’s the paper about stretchable and bendable batteries.” 

At Stanford, Mackanic earned his PhD in chemical engineering while working in the lab of Zhenan Bao, a renowned chemical engineer and polymer materials scientist best known for her research on skin-inspired electronics. 

“That expertise combined with the encouragement of my mentor on the entrepreneurship side gave me the confidence I needed to take that first step—and so I did.” 

In spring 2020, he earned an Innovation Transfer Grant from the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy, which provided financing for practical support, such as hiring interns and conducting external technology validation. 

“That was the first grant, the first funding we ever received,” he says. 

From winning the TomKat grant, to earning a StartX grant, to taking a class called Hacking for Defense, a string of Stanford resources bridged the early team to a $600,000 grant through National Security Innovation Capital, a program of the U.S. Department of Defense. And that’s when things really took off. 

The startup jumped from two to 35 employees within four years, but it might never have launched at all without the early encouragement and initial funding. 

“The TomKat Center allowed me to push this technology to a little bit bigger scale and do research that was more focused on industrialization and commercialization rather than doing pure fundamental R&D,” says Mackanic.

This article is part of the TomKat Center Spotlight series designed to highlight the impact and trajectory of the work of faculty and students who received funding through our Innovation Transfer Program, TomKat Solutions, and Graduate Fellowships. Stanford University does not endorse any non-Stanford entities, programs, products, or services listed in the article.