From NENY Regional Economic Competitiveness Officer, Bandhana Katoch. Edited by Katie Liu
Advancing clean energy storage is increasingly crucial as the world moves toward and demands electrification, not just to meet climate goals, but also for national competitiveness, supply-chain security and economic growth. As the United States nurtures its own deep technologies in its journey to catch up in the global race, the innovation of batteries — chemistry, manufacturing and even the cell type — is among those advancements.
To remain competitive and even leapfrog global peers, nurturing novel and emerging innovations right here at home is key. In order to reshore battery technology in the U.S., it is not enough to just support up-and-coming entrepreneurs — we must actively enable them to build sustainable companies and organizational cultures. This is the goal around which the ChargeUp Accelerator was constructed, which is currently the nation’s only accelerator dedicated exclusively to battery technologies, run under the Binghamton University-led New Energy New York (NENY) initiative. NENY is New York state’s flagship battery and energy storage ecosystem. This momentum is further reinforced by ecosystem builders such as Volta Foundation, a global battery industry network advancing collaboration, talent development and knowledge-sharing across the battery value chain.
Innovation lifecycles
Like many deep-tech ventures, battery startups follow a long and capital-intensive innovation lifecycle. Getting a bright idea is only the first step in the innovation process. After that initial idea, entrepreneurs must validate and then develop it into a concept. Once they have established proof of concept, they can then tackle prototyping, before taking that to small scale production. This is where entrepreneurs might encounter what’s been coined their first “valley of death,” a funding gap often bridged through pre-seed capital. Then the cycle repeats as technology and manufacturing readiness levels advance, with more and more funding needed per round.
Addressing these challenges, however, requires more than capital alone. It requires coordinated ecosystems that connect founders to technical expertise, industry partners, investors and policy-aligned infrastructure, an approach increasingly championed by organizations like Volta Foundation and regional initiatives such as NENY.
Most companies who participate in ChargeUp are early in their lifecycles. They have at least two employees working full-time and have just reached that prototyping stage, about to raise their first pre-seed rounds. How can we help these founders to cross these valleys, when everybody shows up with different needs and innovations?
How ChargeUp Accelerator enables Battery Entrepreneurs
ChargeUp is a deliberate experiment to test whether mentorship and financial support can help boost investor, investment and manufacturing readiness levels for early startups. So far, two cohorts have completed its combined virtual and in-person curriculum, which provides more than 200 hours of instruction, based in the upstate New York region. The program’s design is informed by best practices emerging from the broader battery innovation community, including insights shared through Volta Foundation’s global convenings and research.
A central mission of this accelerator program is to provide battery companies with the foundation and baseline that they can use in whatever context they end up choosing. Building a company from the ground-up is like building a house, and having the proper base, terrain and materials is just as important as having an architectural blueprint in the first place. But it’s impossible to provide the same exact instruction and resources for every startup. Some, for example, have bigger gaps to cross and thus need to raise more funds than others.
Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, ChargeUp Accelerator’s primary focus is equipping young companies with the foundational skills they need to build their own pathways across these critical early gaps. It aims to accomplish this through a few aspects, the first one of which is building opportunities to train for investor pitches and investment readiness into the program.
ChargeUp companies have the opportunity to practice and receive feedback on their pitching and public speaking skills with investors throughout the program. They also receive guidance on how to consistently update their investment materials, from due diligence folders to data rooms. All this culminates in a final investor event during Climate Week NYC.
ChargeUp is also purposely designed to encompass the battery supply chain as a whole. Companies are specifically chosen with focuses in battery manufacturing, materials, chemistry and even system management. By placing a tight-knit group of companies together in a learning environment to introduce them to contexts and perspectives outside of their own, ChargeUp enables the creation of collaborations that might otherwise have remained undiscovered. Even among the cohorts that have already finished the program in the last two years alone, they have already begun establishing partnerships that can be mutually beneficial to both companies. This full value-chain approach mirrors the systems-level perspective promoted by Volta Foundation, which emphasizes that scaling battery technology requires coordination across materials, manufacturing, policy, workforce and markets.
Finally, regional networking opportunities are another major priority of the program. This way, it’s possible to both uplift the companies who are drawn to the growing battery and energy storage cluster being cultivated by NENY across upstate New York, as well as the region itself. Startup founders are exposed to potential manufacturing and strategic partners and stakeholders throughout the program, planting seeds for future collaborations even if they don’t happen immediately. By anchoring ChargeUp within NENY, founders gain access not only to mentorship and curriculum, but also a long-term regional platform designed to support commercialization, workforce development and manufacturing scaling.
Timing is key
While ChargeUp is the nation’s first accelerator program to focus exclusively on battery startups, there are a plethora of other effective accelerator programs for other fields and sectors. One unique aspect of ChargeUp, however, is its time frame. Many accelerator programs are fast-paced, as implied by the name, running between nine to 12 weeks. ChargeUp, on the other hand, takes up half a year.
This extended timeline, especially at such a crucial stage in a company’s lifecycle, might be comparable to a summer internship versus 7-month co-op. It allows for founders to understand available resources deeper and to mature their connections.
Much of ChargeUp’s structure owes itself to the model provided by NextCorps’ Luminate program, which is a hybrid 7-month accelerator program focusing on next-generation optics, photonics and imaging. This kind of accelerator structure isn’t just conducive to successful battery technologies, but deep technology in general — from medical devices to even precision agriculture.
Reframing valleys of death and how to cross them
When it comes to these infamous “valleys of death,” much of the struggle that startups face on the way to market is the fact that lab environments, where technology is first born, are starkly different from the context of a much more volatile marketplace. Founders must juggle customer discovery, intellectual property rights, patent filing, sales and marketing, funding, and much more. Each one of these areas is an additional layer of context that constructs the company, or rather, the bricks that build up the metaphorical “house.”
Our job isn’t to provide a singular solution to founders who are working to cross these gaps, because a singular answer does not exist. Moreover, not every successful battery company in the country has undergone ChargeUp’s curriculum. But regardless, we must be entrepreneurial enablers. Efforts like Volta Foundation’s at the global level and NENY’s at the regional level demonstrate how aligned ecosystems can de-risk early innovation while accelerating time to market. By helping founders gain the foundational tools, skills and know-how to navigate the changing market landscape, we can become the support system that startups need in order to create sustainable, long-term success — and in doing so, position the U.S. as a global leader in the next generation of battery innovation.