It started in Lab 4-061 in the basement of building 4 of MIT. Prof. Donald Sadoway had been working on Solid Polymer Electrolyte (SPE) Li-Metal batteries the late 1990s, and the work was accelerated in 2007 when the Department of Energy boosted its research funding for batteries and MIT established the MIT Energy Initiatives. Dr. Qichao Hu, SES Founder and CEO, first worked on photovoltaics at Harvard from 2007 to 2009 and was fired twice for failure to publish, dropped out of Harvard, and serendipitously joined Prof.
Sadoway’s group, where he did his doctoral and postdoctoral research on Solid Polymer Ionic Liquid (SPIL) Li-Metal batteries. We incorporated SolidEnergy Systems on April 17th, 2012, used the award money from business plan competitions to hire a small team, took worldwide exclusive license from MIT, while we eventually dropped the license, the fundamental studies done at MIT remains at the core of our Li-Metal development today.
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