Startup battery company Imara folds, sells equipment to Yardney

Last year I did a Prying Eyes tear-down article on a lithium ion battery, working with a company in Silicon Valley called Imara. Part of the interest for me in the Imara battery was the company’s location in the Valley as a company which is basically a manufacturing company, and whose competition is located in Asia: Almost of the large volume battery manufacturers like Sony and Panasonic manufacture their products in China or Japan. How could a little start-up in Silicon Valley, not known as a hotbed of manufacturing, compete?

Unfortunately, the answer seems to be, it couldn’t. At the end of last year Imara closed up shop. According to a post on the company blog:

“After 4 years at taking a run at the battery industry with a most promising technology, Imara is out of funds and out of time. We never could get the Operations scaled up and after a year delay, investors needed to cut their losses. In the end, in this exec’s opinion, the battery industry is not about producing compelling PowerPoints, it is about the nuts and bolts of equipment design, process control and repeatability and producing a quality product at high run rates.” [Italics added.]

Imara was primarily backed by venture capital. It was unsuccessful in getting any of the government’s $2B stimulus money, some of which was targeted at green technology development such as new battery technology. According to Greentech Media, Neal Maguire, Imara’s VP of Business Development says, “…Unless something radically changes, the battery business is for big players that want to create billion dollar business units not VC-backed startups."

But maybe there’s another way. Last week Yardney Technical Products purchased Imara’s production assets for use on its own expanding product lines. Yardney is the company that makes the battery packs that power the Mars Rovers, as well as the Phoenix Lander. For a three-part series on all that can go wrong with solar-charged battery packs on Mars, reader this series with Yardney applications engineer Bill Yalen.

Yardney is doing quite well in the DOD/NASA space right now, but has an eye on the consumer market. Says Kris Johanessen, Yardney’s Director of Business Development “We intend to bring our experience to the electric vehicle market eventually, but

right now we are preparing for significant increases in our existing product line.”

There was a thought-provoking discussion of going after high-volume manufacturing in a market already dominated by Asian manufactuers in the PowerSource blog post, Stimulus package’s $2B investment in domestic US battery manufacturing. For those of you who urged against this path, it looks like Yardney agrees that going after the high-margin battery markets first and proving you can do more than make PowerPoints slides is a good strategy.