Aug. 20, 2026 by Katie Liu
Novel lithium-based chemistry aims for transformation across aviation, auto, and maritime transport
Before jumping into the entrepreneurial world together as co-founders, Aaron Garg and Jack Fawdon’s paths converged while they were working on lithium metal batteries at a company called Cuberg. Garg had years of chemical engineering experience under his belt, having finished his university thesis on electrocatalytic materials, while Fawdon had finished his PhD at Oxford University similarly researching batteries.
Their experiences working together on batteries with lithium metal chemistries eventually spawned their own startup, WattUp Energy — which is now one of the several battery and energy storage companies taking part in New Energy New York’s ChargeUp Accelerator.
What is WattUp Energy after? The world’s highest performance battery.
“We’re building a product that can really move the needle for electrifying transportation markets, without compromising important factors like costs, safety, and cycle life,” Garg said.
WattUp Energy aims to transform transportation across all sectors, whether in the air, on land, or in the sea. Its novel chemistry aims to be compatible with current infrastructure, enabling quick scaling at a low cost — while packing 100% more energy density and 200% more power density than conventional lithium-ion chemistries.
As a participant of the ChargeUp Accelerator program, WattUp Energy is embedded into the growing battery ecosystem and industry cluster of upstate New York, receiving more than 200 hours of virtual and in-person curriculum alongside mentorship. ChargeUp Accelerator is the premier program of its type in the U.S. to exclusively focus on battery and energy storage startups. It is a flagship program of NENY, which is one of three Binghamton University-led battery coalitions in the region.
How to build the best battery
Before WattUp Energy, Garg and Fawdon were busy investigating the issues persistently plaguing lithium-metal batteries at their previous company — more precisely, they were trying to solve the issue of thermal runaway behavior.
In the process, Garg found that the culprit behind much of the thermal runaway was actually the battery’s NMC cathode. Conventionally, lithium-ion batteries are made with this metallic mix of nickel, manganese, and cobalt oxides. Building a better battery would have to start with addressing this snag.
“Actually changing the cathode to a different material, or reducing the nickel content, was what we believed would improve the safety of those cells,” Garg said.
When the company eventually closed, Garg and Fawdon wanted to use their experiences and the principles they learned from their time doing research and development, in order to arrive at their own unique innovation.
“We felt there’s a way to design not just high-performance batteries, but also safe batteries. That was what motivated us. We wanted to build off the learnings we had at Cuberg but not their IP,” Garg said. “Knowing what we know now, how would we design and build a new cell that’s high performance and safe and all the other things that are needed?”
WattUp Energy uses manganese-based cathodes instead of the typical NMC, which enables greater energy density and significantly enhanced safety at a lower cost. Safety tests on WattUp Energy’s cells showed no thermal runaway when a nail was driven through them, in contrast to violent explosions for NMC chemistries. In addition to improving upon battery cathodes, Garg and Fawdon also targeted the other two components of a cell: the anode and electrolyte.
Their electrolyte, Fawdon said, is a liquid material, while their anode utilizes lithium metal rather than conventional graphite. WattUp Energy’s electrolyte has been redesigned to boost the battery’s cycle life, while also remaining compatible with the new anode and cathode materials that lower the risk of thermal runaway events.
“By combining lithium metal with this manganese-based cathode, we are hitting energy densities that are surpassing 500 watt-hours per kilogram,” Fawdon said. “This is not something that you see on the market currently.”
In the field of clean energy, technologies often straggle in adoption time — scalability is just as key for a new innovation as its novelty. When making these changes to their batteries, Garg and Fawdon opted for liquid electrolytes over solid state, as well as electrode materials that could be easily replicated and produced through existing infrastructure.
“One of our guiding principles in moving forward with the technology that we are developing started from a place where it needs to be scalable and manufacturable,” Garg said. “We deliberately made decisions to ensure that what we were doing would be drop-in compatible with existing manufacturing lines, so we wouldn’t have to develop any new manufacturing processes, which would significantly increase the time and capital needed to actually deploy our technology.”
Ultimately, these efforts culminate in a battery that Garg and Fawdon say can check all the boxes. It is applicable across our three most important transportation sectors: aviation, maritime, and automotive, with aviation benefiting crucially from their technology’s gravimetric energy density.
“Every pound matters in those applications. Right now, with conventional lithium-ion batteries for a lot of drones, for example, their flight times might be in the 30-minute range. If you can double the energy density, you can put twice as many batteries into your aircraft or drone. Then, you can essentially double the flight time or range you get out of it,” Garg said.
Getting this crucial boost in energy density and efficiency, without having to disrupt existing and established processes, is not something many other cells can offer all at once, Fawdon said. All this, while maintaining a U.S.-based supply chain and supporting domestic production.
“To us, there is no other chemistry that combines all of these factors — energy, power, safety — while also being scalable and easy to manufacture,” he said.
“The energy density of 500 watt-hours per kilogram, plus the power density of 3,500 watts per kilogram, is basically unmatched in all the next-generation alternatives,” Garg added.
Building things with impact
Since its founding in 2024, WattUp Energy has established a new lab facility last February, where it finished proof-of-concept testing and demonstrations on small coin cells. They have also demonstrated the technology on 5 Ah pouch cell prototypes and are currently scaling up pilot production.
Through ChargeUp, the company has been able to gain funding through NENY’s Technical Assistance Program which further supports prototype development and safety testing, the latter of which WattUp Energy is doing through NENY coalition partner, Rochester Institute of Technology.
“That’s a critical benefit for us. Every dollar is really helpful at this point,” Garg said.
One of the primary missions of the ChargeUp Accelerator is also to ensure its companies are investment-ready by the end of the six-month program. With ambitions to begin seed fundraising and pitch to potential investors, Garg found the business development and mentorship of ChargeUp aligned well for WattUp Energy’s own timeline.
“I hadn’t really thought about how to actually go into a sales meeting and convince a customer to sign a deal. A lot of aspects on the marketing and sales sides of things, we just don’t have experience with, as more technical engineers,” Garg said. “That side of stuff has been really helpful to learn, with someone to guide us through that.”
Looking ahead, WattUp Energy is planning to have a product out on the market within the next two years. Along the way, Garg and Fawdon are powered by a resolute belief in the product they have made and the vision they have for a cleaner future.
“Having worked both in academia and in industry around this lithium-metal, high energy battery technology, learning what is necessary to commercialize that technology, and then having the idea, then coming together and executing on it is exciting,” Fawdon said. “As the results come in, you get more excited. Then, you want to continue, so that we can actually see a product like this commercialized at scale across industries.”