By Katie Liu | July 29, 2026
Biochemistry solutions offer faster adoption and supply chain boost
The same biological processes that construct the most complex nanostructures in the natural world can also power the next generation’s energy transition. This is the idea that jumpstarted Molhill, Inc., a startup which tailors nature’s pre-written laws for novel battery solutions.
“We are working with biochemistry, which is our bread and butter,” said Brian Mendoza, CEO and founder of Molhill. “The idea and focus of the company is to take a lot of the principles and mechanisms of biochemistry, and apply them to various processes and flow sheets.”
Sustainable chemistry is a key tenet of Molhill. In a space that constantly spawns new chemistries and technologies, Mendoza saw barriers standing between getting innovations off lab counters and onto market shelves. More precisely, in order to successfully scale projects, companies often needed entirely new structures and processes to make them possible.
“What I wanted to do was really help move the needle, and be the bridge between what was a legacy way of doing things and that new technology,” he said. “That’s where working at the molecular level comes in. Our innovation can work in these legacy systems, but also set the foundation for de-risking and further optimizing those process technologies and form factors that could be used in the future.”
Whether it’s for refining crucial minerals used for energy storage technologies or creating unique alternatives to conventional electrode binders and solvents, Molhill’s molecular solutions could be key to unlocking next-generation technologies that have been awaiting widespread production and adoption.
“This company is very attentive to innovation,” Mendoza said. “By that, I mean this company is not trying to do too much or too little. It’s really focused on hitting the Goldilocks zone of innovation and commercialization.”
Molhill is one of the nine companies to take part in ChargeUp Accelerator’s third cohort this year. ChargeUp, one of the flagship programs under the Binghamton University-led battery coalition New Energy New York, is the first and only accelerator program in the U.S. to focus solely on battery and energy storage startups.
Chemical modalities
The birth of Molhill is, in some ways, a reflection of Mendoza’s own academic upbringing. He obtained his Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular engineering, juggling his time in the lab to mainly research synthetic biology and genetic engineering. By then, he had also already jumped into the broader field of energy storage professionally.
Along the way, he saw all the ways his academic roots could intersect with fast-growing industry, from enzymes and proteins to amino acids and polymers. Biological components have even made their way into mining, with techniques emerging to utilize microbes to extract crucial minerals from ore.
“Biology has so much potential. Just look at everything biotechnology has done for pharma and medicine,” Mendoza said. “But I felt like the two industries — biotechnology and critical materials — hadn’t quite figured out how they could help each other best.”
Molhill currently offers several product options, which are primarily sourced from natural yeast fermentation. Its first product is a drop-in, low-dose mix of enzymes and proteins that can improve and speed up the purification and refining process of lithium carbonate. It also offers proprietary solutions to aid the synthesis of battery precursor materials and electrode fabrication — including binder formulations that are free of harmful forever chemicals, or PFAS.
What unites these products, Mendoza adds, is their intrinsic tunability — thanks to nature. Applying biology that already has what Mendoza calls a “complex or coordinated reaction infrastructure” can break the bottlenecks restricting industries that have not conventionally had access to that modularity.
“There are a lot of different battery chemistries and cathode mixes out there. Everybody’s got their own secret sauce. Ultimately, as you’re trying to work on changing them, you are improving those chemistries within a process,” Mendoza said. “Traditional chemistry does not always give you the ability to easily modify your input organic materials while using the same manufacturing process. Biochemistry does.”
A tailored experience at ChargeUp
At the moment, Molhill is continuing to refine its product portfolio. Though based in California, Mendoza finds his experience flying across the country to upstate New York and undergoing ChargeUp’s battery-focused programming has been a worthwhile investment.
“Every accelerator probably gives you your financial model and customer discovery training. But if I was sitting next to an alternative soda company, we’d have very different customer discovery processes,” he said. “Having an accelerator that’s tailored to the industry you’re in is so incredibly invaluable.”
ChargeUp, which combines more than 200 hours of curriculum alongside connections to industry veterans, manufacturing opportunities, and potential customers, comprises one node of NENY’s broader mission to bolster New York as America’s battery capital. Currently, Binghamton University is the only institution in the U.S. to have the backing of three federally designated battery initiatives, including NENY, the National Science Foundation Energy Storage Engine in Upstate New York, and the NENY Tech Hub.
“I think most of the companies in the cohort find having the NENY and NSF Energy Storage Engine resources that we are intimately tied into as really, really powerful product development accelerators. Molhill is no exception,” Mendoza said. “That access to non-dilutive funding for companies that are in a space where it sometimes takes a year or more to get a product to market is critical for success.”
No mountains out of molehills
As the old idiom goes, don’t go making a mountain out of a molehill. But when it comes to his work in the battery business, Mendoza has found this mindset funnily apt for entrepreneurial success. Not all technologies need huge paradigm shifts to enter the market, he said, just the right interventions and bridges, at the right time.
“If you have to surmount a mountain order for your new technology to proliferate, you’re most likely not going to succeed,” he said. “The idea of Molhill is: what are the small, targeted, elegantly simple process improvements that we can create through deploying biology?”
Picture a small village a couple hundred years ago, before the invention of automobiles and rubber tires and batteries, trying to bypass a pesky mountain range in order to sell to the big city. The only choices were to clear out the mountain standing in the way, or take the main, already paved road, mottled with wheel-wrecking molehills.
“Say you asked those people drawing those carriages, ‘Would you rather me blow up the mountain and spend 10 years clearing that out in order for you to get through the pass, or would you rather I just come in and smooth out all those molehills on the side of the road so you have less frequent breakdowns?’” Mendoza said. “Chances are they’re going to say, ‘Yes. Smooth out the molehills. Those are our immediate problems we run into all the time. We’re used to traveling this road. We don’t want to wait 10 years for something. Give us something now that can fix it.’”
Mendoza wandered between aspirations growing up, bouncing from a childhood dream of becoming a marine biologist to an adolescence thinking he’d grow up to become a medical doctor. But during his first year in college, he took a class around planetary health, which spurred him to choose a new path altogether.
“The marine biology side was about wanting to help the ocean. The medical side was wanting to make people’s lives better,” he said. “This idea that I could take this concept of health improvement and apply it to really fun, super complex problems that were scientific, commercial, and socioeconomic in nature — that’s really what coalesced my career focus on biochemistry for industry.”
He saw entrepreneurship as the best way he could translate scientific ideas into useful and impactful technology. Though his calling of choice is not an easy one, Mendoza embraces the challenges and pressures, just as he did in college.
“I remember being bored in a chemistry class and asking the professor if I could skip it and go to the next one. All my classmates said I was crazy for giving up the easy A,” he said. “But I didn’t want to sit there and learn, more or less, what I’ve already taught myself.”
Jumping ahead by two classes, Mendoza spent the next semester wrestling with entirely new and unfamiliar concepts.
“I think I ended up with either a B or B plus, and was just so proud that I conquered that,” he said. “I gave up the A, but that wasn’t the point. It was to challenge myself. If I knew I was guaranteed success, it wasn’t a worthwhile endeavor.”
As for what the future holds for him, and whether that comes with the prospect of failure, Mendoza — a scientist, innovator, and athlete by training — isn’t making a mountain out of that particular molehill.
“Pole vault training is the same way. It’s a very mentally taxing, challenging sport, where you end every meet on a failure. That’s how you exit a meet,” he said, before adding with a laugh, “Unless you’re the world record holder.”