Katherine Keddie: Hello, and welcome to Scaling Green-Tech. We are Katherine Keddie and Matt Jaworski, co-founders of Adopter. Adopter was Europe's first marketing agency to specialise in climate tech and adaptation. In this podcast, we take you behind the scenes of climate tech's most inspiring journeys, from breakthrough scaling wins to game-changing innovations.
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Hello, and welcome back to Scaling Green-Tech with me, Katherine Keddie. I'm here today with a fantastic guest. I've got Will Tope, who's the CEO of LiNa Energy. Hi, Will.
Will Tope: Hi.
Katherine Keddie: Thank you so much for joining us. The first question we ask every guest to force some brevity and some simplicity is how would you describe LiNa Energy to a five-year-old?
Explaining LiNa Energy and salt batteries to a five-year-old
Will Tope: I have a five-year-old. My eldest is a five-year-old. I don't know if I'm setting myself up to fail now. But what I talk to him about is I start with solar, and he knows about solar. He knows how incredible solar is, that we can make electricity from the sun. And he also knows that it only works when the sun is shining.
And so what I tend to tell him when he asks what Daddy does is that LiNa Energy builds batteries that we can connect to things like solar. It allows them to distribute power all the time, not just when it's sunny, so it can distribute a steady flow of electrons all the time. And what I then focus on is what's really exciting about LiNa Energy is all of our clever scientists in the labs have found a way to make these batteries out of salt, the same salt that you put on your chips, the same salt that I probably have too much of.
But because there's so much salt everywhere around the world, it allows us to build really big batteries. So not just a battery to power your iPad, but batteries big enough to power an entire home, to power factories, and ultimately to power communities, whole communities.
Katherine Keddie: And what does he say when you explain it to him like that?
Will Tope: He tends to just talk about batteries in his toys and say, "Can I use them in my remote control car?" And I have to explain no, we're thinking about bigger than that." So yeah, maybe I did set myself up to fail there. But
Katherine Keddie: it sounds like it came across well, which is the whole point, and I think that was a good summary.
Give us your elevator pitch then for our adult listeners.
Will Tope: Yeah. I would like to believe that my five-year-old explanation would- ... be sufficient for a modern venture capitalist, but- Yeah ... admittedly, that hasn't always been the case in my experience. I think for the adults, the key part to focus on is on the tech, so is how have we made this possible at LiNa Energy, right?
The elevator pitch and reviving the 1980s ZEBRA chemistry
And when we look at the technology, really important is that LiNa Energy is not a battery chemistry company. We haven't invented a brand-new chemistry to make batteries out of salt. What we actually did was delve back into the history books and found a chemistry that's been around all the way back to the 1980s.
People call it the ZEBRA battery. And we looked at that, and we saw these incredible performance metrics. It's super safe, inherently safe. It lasts forever and ever. It's really resilient, and it's made out of really cheap, abundant, raw materials. And so the obvious question is if we already have this technology all the way back to the 1980s, why aren't we using it everywhere?
And it all came down to the manufacturing method, and one component in particular acted as an Achilles' heel, which is the electrolyte in that battery. So this is a thick ceramic tube, and when you come to manufacture that, it's much like pottery. You have to move these thick ceramic tubes into a very high-temperature furnace.
You need to bake them to sinter the ceramics over a long period of time. If you heat them up too quickly, they'll crack. Take them back out, and it's the opposite of what you expect in modern mass manufacturing, high-throughput manufacturing. And so what we did was we looked to adjacent fields, like solid oxide fuel cells and electrolyzers- And we took the latest and greatest in material science, specifically in and around ceramics, and we replaced that component with a really thin electrolyte, one that's as thin as 60 microns, and that removed all the energy that you needed to manufacture that electrolyte, made it much faster, removed that Achilles heel, and so it brought the cost down of the battery to really close to just that of the abundant raw materials.
And by bringing the cost down to that level, it did what we really hope, which is, okay, now we have a tool in our tool chest, which is renewables plus a LiNa battery, is just the cheapest source of generating an electron. And that's really important because if you think about current times where our power demand and our thirst for power is exponential- if we just have the best solution, the quickest solution, renewables plus a LiNa battery, that's a really compelling opportunity, right?
Katherine Keddie: And most importantly, the cheapest solution.
Will Tope: Exactly.
Katherine Keddie: Interesting. And so tell us a little bit more about the actual technology behind this. What did the development look like?
How does it work? Where does the, the IP in your company sit? Yeah. What does that look like?
Will Tope: So it doesn't sit with that chemistry, and I've got one of the... and appreciate that some people will be listening to this, not watching this. So what I have in my hands right now is one of those original ZEBRA batteries from the 1980s.
And it basically looks like a thick rectangle, quite heavy. And this is what people still use, actually. So the chemistry is so powerful, even though this is really expensive, and I'll talk about that, and I've mentioned it's all around the electrolyte. People still use it because it is inherently safe, so people use them in submarines, and it's really resilient, so people use them in places like the Middle East, where conventional lithium-ion batteries can't operate.
Manufacturing the thin ceramic electrolyte
And like I said earlier, in one of these, this is a mock-up of what one of those electrolytes would look like. So this is the part that you'd need to move into a furnace, bake, take out. Now, what we do, it starts with what seems very simple, is a substrate, just a piece of stainless steel, right?
That's the, the, the point zero of our technology stack. We then drill a ton of holes, so 60,000 holes into that with a laser driller. And it doesn't look like this, but if you held this up to a light, and I think you did that earlier- ... you can attest to the fact that you can see through this.
Then the magic starts, and we use a very specific ceramic material and a very specific means of manufacturing, where we deposit that material using screen printing technology on a very thin layer, and then we sinter that through a continuous process. And what that allows you to do is take a ton of mass out of it and it means the component cost is very low because you're using hardly any material, and the energy cost is really low. So now you've got your electrolyte. This is a sodium-conductive electrolyte that is so thin, even though it's a fully densified ceramic, it's got a bit of flex to it, which is miraculous. It's very geeky, but that is a very difficult thing to do.
And then we built that same battery in and around that new electrolyte. So we put the cathode in. We put the anode in. We put all the mechanical elements you need to make sure that battery works. So this is just an individual battery cell. We've been working with these for a long time. The journey since then has been moving those battery cells into battery packs and the battery packs into a battery system, incorporating all the power electronics, the software, the battery management system, the thermal management system into what ends up looking like a very boring box that has some plugs in it that you can connect to a grid.
Commercialisation stages and the Lancaster pilot manufacturing line
Katherine Keddie: Interesting. And tell us a bit more about what kind of stage you are as a company. What have you done in terms of commercialisation so far?
Will Tope: So we have taken this technology beyond just individual cells, which I mentioned earlier. We- that was our first proof point is being able to build individual cells, independently test them.
The next stage was similar to what I just mentioned, starting to build small packs, so one kilowatt-hour systems that we mostly did in a grant environment. So we had commercial partners like Ion Ventures, but we are very warmly supported by government bodies as well. That next step then it became much more commercial as we started building out the systems that I mentioned earlier, and we've done some pilot projects, including in India with Tata Group, which is a really nice customer.
We can talk later about how did we get involved with that, why did we get involved with that. Once we had demonstrated that on a system level, we have a really compelling product with really high efficiency, et cetera, then we built a pilot manufacturing line. So we have two labs in Lancaster, and now we have right next door a pilot manufacturing site, which is incredible, and that demonstrated the manufacturability of these electrolytes on an equivalent scale of about one megawatt hour per year.
That was really just to demonstrate that, yes, we're using first-of-a-kind technologies, but we have a clear map for how you produce them en masse. And then now we're just closing our fundraise to allow us to bring that to a true commercial scale. We'll have over 100 megawatt-hours per year of product that we can put into shipping containers and do true commercial installs with our partners, given that they really want a lot of batteries.
A 10 kilowatt hour system doesn't necessarily give them the capacity they really want.
Katherine Keddie: I would love to ask you more questions about commercialisation. We will get into that further, but before we do, I'd like to hear a bit more about you as an individual. So you joined the company five years ago.
Will Tope: Yep.
Katherine Keddie: Previous to that, you were in oil and gas.
Will Tope: That's correct.
From oil and gas at ExxonMobil to climate founder
Katherine Keddie: Tell us a bit about your journey and what got you here, and also what you learnt through working in oil and gas that you've applied to your learnings at LiNa Energy.
Will Tope: Sure. I was originally long time ago, I was a chemical engineer.
So I started my career as a process engineer in the oil and gas industry down at the Fawley Refinery in the UK, in, in Southampton. But I only lasted a year or so at that until I was kinda plucked out into a more commercial setting, which I think both parties recognised might be a l- little bit closer to my area of expertise.
And I spent just over 10 years in the commercial side of oil and gas, where I went through a lot of early days it was on the trading floor, but more in origination, so OTC deals, that kind of stuff. Then did a long stint doing business development across M&A on both the sell side up in Aberdeen, and then on the purchaser side out in the United States.
And then towards the end of my career in oil and gas at ExxonMobil, I was part of a new developed trading group. I was the chief of staff for this new trading group they were building. A lot of that focus was on was on power, and so that got me first into batteries and sniffing around what was...
Going back all the way to kinda 2018, 2019 was my first inclination into looking at batteries for grid storage. At that time it was a cottage industry. There were some mavericks here in the UK, like Gresham House and Zenobe had started pioneering that front. But for most people, convincing them that you could fill a shipping container with battery packs from a Roadster and plug it into the grid seemed pretty wacky.
But I was a- awoken to just how huge the potential of this new sector would be. I just looked at the numbers and recognised, okay, this is one of those missing links that are gonna need solving for. And so then whilst I was working on battery stuff, without getting into the specifics, I came across a company called LiNa Energy, and I met the technical founders, and they were at that point then having demonstrated individual cells, right?
And I started talking to them 'cause I was starting to build energy storage projects in my head and I understood where the sector needed to be, and I talked to the technical founders and it was very much a, I think, technology-led, you see a lot in the UK, R&D-focused company with an incredible team, incredible technology, but perhaps, I don't think I'm insulting them, perhaps not the right commercial direction in that, all the focus at that time was on EVs and- there was a very strong belief that if we were gonna raise money and we were gonna be successful we needed to make sure we were addressing the EV sector as well as stationary storage, which was still relatively in its infancy. And then in, in 2021, after a long conversation with the founders, I kinda got off the comfy couch, which was oil and gas said goodbye to my final salary pension And then jumped upon the, the entrepreneurship journey as what I like to consider myself now, a late founder And really led all the commercialization from then, and ultimately stepped up to be the CEO as we entered that next inevitable, logical step of the company growth.
In terms of lessons learned, certainly a very strong understanding of energy markets, how people buy and sell energy, that's critical, right? And understanding what you need to design your product for. I think second of all is I've always spent my time very much I've been a business development manager I don't know how many times in my career, right?
Business development versus sales in deep tech
But very much business development as opposed to sales, right? And that's something that I do think there's an important differentiation there. And becomes particularly relevant when you're developing brand-new technologies, in that these are long commercial relationships you are developing over years and years as you continue to validate your technology, scale your technology.
It is not a commission-based sales process where you need to fill an order book and then your job is done. Because some people do take that, that route. Some people build a pipeline way beyond their technology can de- deliver into. And as, as the CEO of LiNa when I jumped in, Gene told me is like, "You don't wanna blow up that balloon too fast," right?
'Cause it will inevitably pop. So I think it gave me a really strong understanding of a slow sales cycle, true origination in terms of building something that no one else has done before, and that strategic business development where you're chasing the end goal is a strong partnership that's gonna last 10, 20 years plus, not a transactional sale.
Escaping the pilot graveyard
Katherine Keddie: And I think particularly a, a classic problem with new tech solutions in any industry is having those pilots and then being stuck in what we call internally at Adopter the pilot graveyard. Yeah. So you end up having pilot after pilot. You're speaking to maybe the innovation team in a company.
Their KPI is all to do with how many pilots they run rather than actual conversion. Yeah. And what you're doing there is maybe you're hitting all your KPIs for that seed funding round, and your sales team is proving commercial traction on paper. Yeah. But you're not building that long-term relationship that will help you move then from that initial pilot into a serious scale-up commercial agreement.
Will Tope: Yeah.
Katherine Keddie: So having that longevity in mind when doing business development is absolutely crucial for a company like yours.
Will Tope: Yeah, and I think that, th- Both sides can conduct themselves in a way that is very short term. And that you can also sign up a bunch of pilot projects with the only real reason being to d- to demonstrate necessary commercial traction to raise money, right?
A- and the, the money raising is not the business development. That is, filling the tank up, right? The driving and getting to the destination is the business. And it can become very distracting to the build if you're just trying to jump through the hoops to raise the money.
Not least because by the time you get through the hoop, the rules will have changed. The rules of what you need to have done versus not done- ... Series A or series B or C honestly changes within two weeks, right? Sentiment is always shifting. But what you can bank on is if you've got a partnership where that partner is willing to share how excited they are about your technology and how they're gonna use it in a very big way once the company scales, that is, that has its own merit, right?
A very strong merit. In fact, it's impossible to build a business that is building a first-of-a-kind technology without multiple of those.
Finding product-market fit
Katherine Keddie: Yeah, interesting. Tell us a little bit more about your initial pilot work with Tata in India. What did that process look like in terms of getting that first sale, and then how are you looking at that relationship from a long-term perspective for future growth and scaling?
Will Tope: Yeah, so I think the first step in that, I remember the first meetings when I was out in India, even maybe before that- what brought us to India was those fundamentals. So maybe that goes back to lessons learned in oil and gas. Okay, we'll st- study the market first. We looked at India, and we looked at the amount of solar power generation out there, which was astronomical, right?
It was growing rapidly. And then going back to, this is probably 2021, we looked at, okay, at that point, there was a lot of batteries being installed in the UK, and then went and looked, and there was only about 10 megawatt-hours of battery in India deployed, which is a couple of shipping containers, maybe three, and it made no sense, right?
There was a fundamental break there, in that if you've got all this solar power, you're still burning a lot of coal, and there's no storage deployed. There must be something that isn't working in that market. So we had a hunch. And then we met with all sorts of customers, including Tata, and I remember one of the first meetings holding up an individual battery cell and saying, "Okay, what we'd really like to do is demonstrate what this battery can do for you."
And then the response is, "Okay, I don't need one. I need 300,000 and 50 megawatt hours," right? And I was like just hold on a second, right? Let's really understand why, what you want in that product." And that led us to understand something that we had hypothesized about but we didn't see in the flesh until we really started working, not just in India, we do a lot of work in the Middle East as well, but that whilst there are tons of lithium ion solutions already out there on the market, and they do work, they are quite compromised by the time you put them in a hot location, as simple as that.
So if you had a large stationary storage lithium-ion battery system in the UK it's gonna generate heat every time it cycles, and then there's a liquid cooling system in there that removes that heat, right? So every time you cycle, it generates a bit of heat, similar to when you plug your phone in on rapid charge; you'll feel it get hotter.
Heat is the enemy of a battery, so you spend energy to remove it. The difference is, once you're in a really hot location in and around the equator, you're not just battling the heat that's generated when you cycle a battery. You're battling the ambient heat. And so at that point, your liquid cooling system that is designed to maybe run a few hours to moderate temperature is now running 24/7, and that creates a whole bunch of additional issues.
So one, it makes the system far more expensive by way of inefficiency because you're just burning through energy cooling the system 24/7. It's like running a refrigerator with the door open, right? So one, things are getting more expensive in that the headline pricing of lithium-ion wasn't reflective of the true cost in these, these markets.
And then two, when it came to installing these batteries, is as soon as you received, if you're an EPC or if you're a construction manager working on a new battery product project, as soon as you got receipt of the battery cells, you need to start cooling them. And if you didn't, they would sit in ambient temperatures, their state of health would get rapidly out of whack, they would start degrading, and all of these additional complexities meant that this was why people weren't installing batteries in locations like India.
So we had to be able to demonstrate that, look, we can withstand all sorts of ambient temperature swings. We did some work on that. Ultimately found a really great location that was mutually beneficial at a, a microgrid they had in Delhi that allowed them as well. I think there's always a bit of to and from in that.
Y- companies do want to demonstrate that they are innovative. That's why they do have innovation departments, right? I don't think the innovation department of a company is the enemy at all. It is a gateway. And so we're able to develop that, and then demonstrate it on a scale whereby it's very easy then to, to, to look at a small system and imagine, "Okay, what if I had 100 of them linked together?"
And so the last part there is just scaling until we start really transacting more on a typical sales process. At some point I'm gonna have to hire someone to do sales. But that's how that relationship developed, and it's one of many we saw. I think w- we... As I mentioned earlier, we did a project with Ion Ventures, a company here in the UK.
We've done some testing out in the Middle East with ACWA Power, who's a huge renewable power. The biggest renewable power generator in the kingdom. We're doing some work with the NEOM project. So we have accumulated all these different partners, the majority of those being in locations that are hot, because that gave us the razor-sharp product market fit that y- is so necessary when you're developing a new technology.
Katherine Keddie: And how did you go about identifying that product market fit? What was the foundation of your go-to-market approach?
Will Tope: There was a bit of macro study, right? Internal. There was- there was that point of looking at breaks in the market that we couldn't explain, and then trying to figure out why, if you've got lots of renewables and not a lot of batteries, when batteries are available to buy, what was getting in the way.
But I would say that is less than 5% of the process versus getting out into the market and seeing firsthand where the system's deployed, what the challenges are they're facing. Talking to the customers is by far the most important thing you can do. Talking in a way that is focused in and around the learning process as opposed to just a pure sales pitch, right?
And I think that goes back to business development and nurturing a partnership is it's very difficult if you're just going out there and claiming you've already figured out what your product market fit and you're the best in the world when you're not already at scale and a billion dollars, right?
Because there's something fundamentally broken there, because why aren't you already at scale with gigafactories and all the rest of it? So I think there has to be that constant iterative focus on product market fit, not only because in the meantime, whilst you're developing your product, the competitive landscape changes, the macros change.
So it's a constantly evolving story. For example, right now it'd be very tempting to just completely refocus our product market fit on data centres 'cause it... Everyone wants to build a data centre, right? But you gotta be consistent in what you know you do well. There are gonna be additional incremental opportunities as time goes on, and that's great.
But I think you need to stay true to what are the things where you talk to a customer, you know they really need a solution, and you know they keep calling you because you must be one of the few people in the world that can solve their problem, right?
Katherine Keddie: You know what, I think this brings up a really interesting dynamic when you're making commercial decisions at a kind of seed to Series A scale-up stage, which is how are you deciding which of your stakeholders to follow?
So for example, let's say you have a set of customers that you've spoken to. You're doing pilots with them. You're building relationships. For them, being consistent in your messaging and who, whose problem you're trying to solve in the technology scale-up is probably the best path, right? Because it allows you to- it's paramount
to grow in that beachhead market, and then to develop and expand from there. On the other hand, I imagine you're also getting a lot of questions from investors that you're speaking to who go, "You should go for data centres because they are the sexy topic of the moment. People are really interested.
There's loads of growth there." It feels like the obvious investor-focused messaging if you're trying to make a go-to-market that serves that audience specifically. So how do you decide who to speak to in that scenario?
Will Tope: I think it's an and. So to be very clear- ... data centres is a great product market fit for us as well, right?
Sure. It's gonna be something that I'm sure we're deploying more and more into over time. Just to tease apart a few parts there. I think- first of all, you might get a lot of prospective advice from VCs because you're having lots of calls with VCs, right? But if it's advice before you've really got to know each other, I think, no offence, that you gotta take it with a pinch of salt in that, at the end of the day, the executive team of the startup lives and breathes this, right?
I, we live and breathe the market, and we s- see evidence through those commercial discussions what is great product market fit versus what is not. And if you raise money on something that you fully, you don't fully buy into or you don't think is the right product market fit, that's never gonna work out, right?
You can only pursue that and take the money in if you're gonna deploy it into that lane, right? Similarly, if investors came to us and said, we are dying for you to put your batteries into space," s- personally, I'd be like, "That's great," 'cause I'm a big space geek and all the rest of it.
Deep in my heart, I know it's not the right technology. So may be able to raise some money, but then if I can't put my battery up into space- and it works, then it's just a waste of everyone's time. To what end? Exactly. But I would say 95%-plus of the investors and 100% of the good investors are really wanting to learn from you.
What has been your product market fit journey? What has been your commercial feedback? What is the status of the various commercial agreements you have? Can I talk to your customers? And that's because they recognise that there is an innate knowledge that's built up into the startup that you can only get from going through that journey, right?
I think the notion that you can slap an AI sticker onto your startup and then raise 100 million based on that sticker is not true. I think there are some companies that have been really well-placed to take advantage of the AI data centre boom at first instance, so anyone deploying modular CCGTs, for example.
I think a... anyone who already had a ton of space and grid connections that maybe they were gonna use for something else can now instantly pivot into that sector. That's very fast, very quick money, and des- deserves to get ploughed into there. I think then there's a next wave of people which is, okay, the power dynamic, literally the power dynamic, not the political power dynamic.
But the, the market, the power market dynamic has fundamentally shifted. Most grids are now growing, not constraining. How are you gonna get into that market? That's a really valid question, and a lot of us are gonna end up selling into that market, whether you're in storage or whether you're in generation- whether you're in software layers when it comes to energy management. All of these sectors will come through, but only if you've gone through the steps of validating your technology and getting a thumbs-up from the end customer, wherever it is, right?
Katherine Keddie: Yeah. I definitely agree with you. I think g- generally, it's a classic challenge of do you lead where you might get investment, but then afterwards- what are you doing with that money?
It means that you're bringing on people also that don't believe in your vision, are not aligned with what you're trying to achieve, which is obviously really crucial when you're an early-stage company.
Will Tope: Yeah.
Katherine Keddie: And also I like your focus on what I would probably call commercial fundamentals, which is speak to your customers, get as much information as you can.
Yeah. Start to build those relationships. Obviously, on our side, like, all of the marketing that we're doing is based on those discussions too, so you need to make sure that you really understand the customer before you start ploughing kind of money into promoting how you frame yourself in that context. Something I was discussing actually this week with a client of ours is how you manage the mentorship approach and transitioning that into a serious commercial discussion.
So let me explain to you what I mean. The mentorship approach is something that I would describe as very common within startups. So you come to an ideal customer, maybe a really large established company. You know the question will be, can you deliver at scale? The current answer is no, but you want to start to build that relationship, maybe do a pilot with them with the intention of eventually growing.
At the beginning, you're just looking for information to work out your product-market fit. So maybe you go to them quite humbly and you say I just want to learn from you. You're an expert in this space. Can I have 20 minutes of your time for a coffee? I would love to talk about this challenge."
And if they think the challenge is important, maybe they'll meet with you and start to build that relationship. The challenge then comes, though, that you have positioned yourself in that scenario as an early-stage company, a startup that is looking to learn, and is maybe coming in humbly, but also perhaps lacking in experience.
And then it's challenging to break out of that mentorship dynamic and move into what will then be a serious commercial conversation in which you would like to be considered on an equal footing so that you're able to negotiate. So firstly, is that something you've experienced? And secondly, how have you gone about solving that problem when it comes to those customer interviews into commercial conversations?
Will Tope: Yeah, I can't say I've ever felt trapped in that type of relationship, and I'm thinking practically why either I'm in disbelief, or we've managed it well, right? The two things that come to mind are, one, BD 101 is it's a very long fuse, right? And so between your first conversation and a signed deal, you've gotta have a very wide aperture to how long that's gonna take.
And what will generally happen over the course of that relationship is that there will be moments when you've done something with another customer or done something pretty impressive, and if those partners can see your success and that you're not reliant individually on just them, that generates that positive goodwill, right?
I don't mean flouting competition for the sake of generating FOMO, I just mean, if I think back to one of our big moments last year was switching on our pilot line, right? All those commercial contacts that we've had, if they have visibility over the fact that we just built a manufacturing pilot line to build batteries in the middle of Lancaster, and we did it really quickly, that turns heads, right?
And it turns something that they will have seen at some point on a PowerPoint- ... into reality that they can see photos of. And then I'll say, "Come see it for yourself. Come on by," right? "We'll take you around." And then it just creates that validation that everyone needs to see that you're not just a PowerPoint deck, that you have got- really smart people, assets, and all the rest of it. I think the other part as well is that I don't think you can ever expect to go to a big company and just absorb for your own benefit what they're telling you. There has to be, in fact, the onus is on the startup to generate value in some way, some form for that big company.
And that value can't just be a tick on their tech tourism KPI that I spoke to another battery company or, I've had a call. I really don't see as much of that anymore. I think maybe there was in the height of clean tech and all the rest of it, there were a lot of people that just had a job to talk, have interesting chats.
I don't think that exists anymore. But for example, if we are doing something even before we get to a pilot project stage, I know we have modelling expertise through the roof in terms of how a battery o- operates from the cell- cellular level through to the grid level. I know that we know exactly how much it will cost for every electron that goes into our system and out of our system.
What we don't necessarily know is what all the other competitors can do. But if I'm in discussion with someone who thinks they want a battery, I can generate and put some people on at relatively low cost for a feasibility study. We say, "Okay, I wanna know your layup. Is it AC/DC? What, what connection have you got coming into the grid?
Where's your generation source? What's your patterns?" And usually we'll get to a, a stage in the relationship where producers will share their generation data- ... right? And then we can produce a really good piece of analysis and say, "Okay, if you were to put storage down on this asset, this is how much uptime you would have.
This is how much it will cost you in terms of the cost of the system. This is how much it's gonna save you over time. This is how it's gonna manifest. I can zoom in on this day on June, and you can understand exactly what we predict the state of health of the battery to be, what the state of charge will be.
We can explain to you- ... when the battery is charging versus discharging," right? And it's all the expertise we take for granted internally, but can actually be super powerful to a large company that is just for the first time stepping into something like energy storage. Yeah. It can answer a lot of their questions.
And yes, do you have the risk that you do all that work and then they go and work with a competitor because now they want a battery? Sure. But I wouldn't underestimate the value in demonstrating your expertise to however big a company it is to really validate that we are serious, we know what we're doing, we understand how these assets operate very innately, and that's why you can ultimately trust us to work with you to deliver the tech- and, a- and unlock all these benefits that we're modeling for you.
Katherine Keddie: Interesting. So you're starting with this sort of consultancy relationship
Will Tope: Yeah, I wouldn't go so far as... if it's as easy- a lot of that knowledge is baked in. So the last thing I'd wanna do is turn a hard tech company into a consultancy dishing out a bunch of feasibility studies, right?
I would not call ourselves, at that stage, a consultancy as opposed to we're in the, the pre-feed stage of a pilot project, right? We're trying to understand what your requirements are, and we're gonna model them for you because we wanna demonstrate the feasibility of the product.
But it's ultimately marketing, right? And we're pretty clear, right? And we've had instances where if we look at the system and it doesn't make sense to put a LiNa system down or it makes more sense to put a lithium-ion battery down where we've got a lot of data, there's no party's interest to continue, right?
So we save time; they save time. Yeah. We get some credit for being transparent and open, right? In that, okay, look, the data says this, so this is not a great fit for you. If you want a one-hour battery, it's probably not what we need to provide for you. And you get that legitimacy, 'cause at some point they're gonna need a LiNa battery, I would've thought, most big generators.
So it's marketing, but it's tech science, data-led kind of, marketing, if that makes sense
Katherine Keddie: Yeah, I think this is a really interesting point because it's very consistent amongst all the companies that we work with, that they would have what I would call, but maybe you wouldn't call, a consulting layer.
And by that, those initial marketing conversations- yeah... where you're working through the challenge with a company. You're providing expertise that you naturally have in the company because of the focus that you have. You're modelling the technology. You're showing the real effect.
It's obviously very valuable for you 'cause you also get some information about how they work and what the benefit could be, for them. And so this is a very important part of the sales process, but it also brings in marketing as a key part of how these sales processes that are for large companies with complex sales cycles and new technologies, how that process works.
Which I think brings us very nicely onto the marketing question- ... that I wanted to discuss with you. And I would say- yeah... you end up with a report, right? That's the other thing that you end up with, is this, okay, conversations are great. Conversations are incredibly important. Face-to-face dis- discussions, site visits, all the rest of it. There's also something else to be able to look and have your champion, 'cause you're, as we all know, you need a champion, right? You need someone to champion your product. For sure. Someone who's really excited about it. Giving, furnishing them with the evidence they need in a professional-looking manner, that this isn't some startup just trying to sell snake oil or-
Will Tope: D- fill the requirements of their fundraise. This, the, these are experts, right? And look at this report. It's pretty incredible. This is... Maybe they look at it in a way as like we would have had to pay BCG $50,000 for this, right? Yeah. And they've got the expertise with a fraction of the people, and actually, the majority of their people are working in the labs.
But look, they can still produce this. So whenever you can demonstrate the strengths of your people and your company and your knowledge, Y- you do it, right? You put your best foot forward, right?
Katherine Keddie: Totally. I think equipping the champion also is a really important part of marketing for a company like yours.
And actually, I think there's often a misconception that the marketing relates to the top of funnel work building awareness for the company, maybe branding work, the website. You think that's what marketing looks like for an early-stage company. But actually, the much more crucial part is the champion that is gonna go into a room that you're not in and sell your solution: do they have all the information, the material that they need to be able to convince those people?
And for those people, who are the final decision-makers, do they have the information that they might need? Do... Are we solving their objections? Does the content on the website, when they inevitably go to the website as part of the sales process to l- Yeah ... to check you out, does the website support those objections, support the, the image that you're trying to portray and the, the key message that you're trying to get across?
Marketing and external eyes
And therefore, marketing plays much more of a complex role in the sales cycle, rather than being this one awareness-building element. How are you approaching marketing in your work? What role does it play in your commercial function?
Will Tope: So I remember, if you go back to that kind of transition from oil and gas to LiNa, and I was coming in as their first kind of general commercial person coming from ExxonMobil, which was very disciplined, very functional, right?
So in ExxonMobil, despite having negotiated countless big deals, pipeline deals, North Sea asset sales, all the rest of it, right? I never would've been let in the room, let alone the keyboard of anyone making a public announcement or a press release. And that is what I, in my head, marketing- started and ended with the press releases and the, the, the official announcements and maybe managing the w- at that point, I don't think ExxonMobil probably had a Twitter feed, but- ... what goes on the Twitter feed. And then within, a day of joining LiNa, I remember the company secretary came to me and said, "Look we've just appointed a new expert advisor, right?
We wanna make sure that the world knows about this, so can you take on the press release for this?" And I was just like, "Oh. Me? I thought I was going to do deals," right? I... And then he's like I think you're the commercial person. You should be able to do it." And first of many instances that can be quite abrasive at first when you're used to a very functional silo.
Not siloed is a bit harsh, but a very functional, structured, disciplined organisation. And then in reality, it's like, okay, sat down, I need to do a press release. Okay, we've got a new advisor, and I knew who she was, and I knew why we'd brought her in. And it's like, okay, what do I actually need to do here?
And this is before ChatGPT as well, right? Which probably made it, it b- much better, right? ... All I need to write down why I think this is important and what it means, and I started that, and I ended up, and then we put it all in the press release, and then suddenly, like that moment of oh, I can do this now, right?
Like it's not necessarily, am I the best at it? No, but I was the best out of everyone in LiNa at that point in time. And o- over the course of my time at LiNa, we have not built an internal marketing team, and we can talk about that, but I am- Always very wary in deep tech, especially, and I'm sure people won't agree with me, but I generally see it as a bit of a warning sign is if you're at, say, seed or pre- Series A, and you've got a couple of full-time marketing experts on your staff, like full-time roles, I see it as a bit of a warning sign, right?
In that, okay, there's not enough, knowing what it's like to be in a hard tech company at seed stage I don't think there's enough to justify having two of your precious head count doing the marketing as opposed to doing the science. And I know I'm talking to a marketer, so I'm probably coming off as an old curmudgeon.
Now, that's different from saying you don't do any marketing at all, and I think- ... we have support, and we work with with marketing experts to be able to translate what we think is a clear message- ... into something that will have the highest impact and the most resonance, and also, I think really importantly, is to ensure that we consistently put out updates on what we're doing and recognize those moments because when you're in build mode, you never really notice those breakthrough moments, right?
Okay, sure, big things like opening the pilot line, I would have remembered to take a photo and probably give an update to shareholders and then the general public. But there's a lot of other steps that happen along the way that are also equally important, like moving across to the next generation of cells, installing a new piece of equipment that unlocks or reduces your bottleneck by X.
Okay, hitting a new milestone in terms of number of cycles and longevity of the batteries, having multiple years of operation. These kinds of things that would not necessarily be immediately obvious that you should market about. They have a sense and an eye for being able to make note of those, and it pays dividends because going back to the earlier conversation, okay, how do you avoid getting stuck in that mentor relationship?
It's by having a steady stream of positive news so that those people that you're already talking to turn their head when you do something really impressive- ... and espouse them to say, "Okay, maybe we should be doing our project now, or maybe we should be moving to the next phase." They're not...
No one can see inside your company unless you are opening the window, right?
Katherine Keddie: Completely agree. There's stuff, there's parts of what you said that I agree with, and parts that I don't agree with. So I think the answer, like all good answers, is it depends. On the one hand, I think having the right team is really important for your marketing commercial, and it depends massively on the company and the stage and the market that you're in, the funding that you have.
Obviously, seed means a completely different thing in many different contexts to you. Yes. You know it's not always a good way to measure what stage a company is commercially. I think there's also a kind of common misconception that marketing is just about the announcements, and I think it's very important, I completely agree with you there, particularly, if you want to be seen as a company that is alive and thriving, and you want to pique interest. And particularly now in the context of LLMs being a big part of how your potential customers might be understanding your work, searching for your work, looking for solutions. It's really important to keep those channels really active and alive. Yeah.
So it's a very crucial function. But there's also parts, like we've discussed, which are how does marketing play a role at each stage of the buyer journey for the customers that you have? And I think having marketing support, either external or internal, that is, has a good understanding of how that sales cycle works, what relationships you've built how marketing fundamentally is playing into the commercial function and growth of your business is the key factor here.
Yeah. And whether that's, like I say, like a fractional CMO or an external marketing agency, or an internal person who is in charge of all marketing, comms, and commercial, but is on top of that work. Yeah. That understanding, I think, is the crucial factor here.
Will Tope: Two things I thought about- just now. One, and I'll I'll try not to come off as a complete arrogant, ... tyrant of a CEO. But I think LiNa's quite unique in that I stepped in as an experienced kind of business developer at that point, where the company clearly needed to find a- and refine its product market fit and dedicate itself to a certain commercial model and- customer and all the rest of it. And so I think there was almost like an immediate binary shift in how LiNa was commercialising its technology, right? And if I look to before I joined as CEO, and again, I'm coming off as very arrogant here, but I'm just being honest. Before that, in dire need of marketing help, not least because the company, LiNa, makes zero sense, right?
We are a company that is marketing a battery product that contains no lithium and contains sodium instead, and yet we have the chemical formula for lithium right in our company name. And that is living evidence of what happens when you let scientists do marketing, right?
And still plagues us today in terms of, I don't know if necessarily some bad marketing becomes good marketing 'cause people will remember us 'cause we have such a confusing name. But I absolutely agree, someone needs to be looking through that. It's almost an internal versus external, right?
And instead of calling it marketing, I think it's almost: who are your external eyes? Because in a deep tech company, 99% of the company is gonna be internally focused, right? It's the constant challenge of building deep tech, and that's not just internal, external, from commercial versus engineering.
It's the general tendency of engineers, of scientists, to focus on their own research in a silo and not be looking out at what the competitors are doing, what is the new norm for good performance, where is the pro- the, the market emerging. All of this stuff, right? I can see how you can characterise that as marketing, as just opening the aperture- that if you don't do it, you're gonna create a redundant product that might impress yourselves but will never generate any money, right? And there are so many examples of deep tech journeys ending up in that, that hump, either continuously innovating on the front end and never getting past TRL three or four because it gets boring and hard and incremental and all the rest of it or building something that by the end of building it had no need, right?
Yeah. And there's like even on consumer grade you got the juice press thing that infamously flopped where made juice, and it cost like $30 a packet or whatever. And so it's not just a deep tech thing, but I agree with you that you need, as soon as you've got something that proves the core science, you need to start opening your eyes externally.
You need someone in your business, whether it's marketing, the CEO, if you have a commercial CEO like me, or you have a, a, a rare externally facing CTO, right? That's the Holy Grail, right? But someone needs to be that interface point between everything that's happening in your lab and the outside world; otherwise I don't think you'd ever gain the commercial traction you need to get the money to build what you really set out to build.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah, classic build it and they will come fallacy, right? Yeah. You think that something's really exciting and cool and amazing.
Will Tope: Yep.
Katherine Keddie: But fundamentally, even if it's the most game-changing thing in the world, if the right people don't understand how it will help them, and you're not making those commercial discussions, you're not framing it in the right way, you're not having those conversations, it doesn't matter cause it will just be dead in a lab.
Will Tope: Yeah, build it, and they will come, as we all know, is the, is completely flawed unless you have unlimited funds, right? And no one does. No. So you're gonna run out of money before you ever get the line out the door to buy a product once it's finished, right?
I feel like now that's pretty universally known.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah.
Will Tope: I think the difficulty is how do you solve that, right? I think most CEOs, CTOs all understand in their core they need to build a product that people want to buy. It's how do you internalise an external mindset into your business? How do you have everyone in the business understand that these are what the competitors are, these are who the competitors are, this is what they're doing- right? This is what we need to focus on for our battery because these are what the customers are saying are really great for our battery, not what you might think or whatnot. Definitely not is what most scientifically is interesting, which is often the default, right? We're not- we don't want scientific difficulty, we want scientific simplicity to achieve those things that the customers have asked to see of our product.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah, I think in my work, the most common area in which that can be achieved is also by combining sales and marketing together as much as possible. So not considering marketing to be this kind of separate comms layer or PR layer but rather an integrated part of the sales process. So for example, in our work, we would often be speaking regularly, on a weekly basis, with sales teams. We're getting direct transcripts from sales calls. We're getting summaries that are sent around the company. So like that really strong consistency is, a client of ours, for example, they have a similar dynamic that you've just described, which is the vast majority of the company is focused internally on the technical development.
And the CEO will send round a summary of every single sales call which they're a part of, which then translates that information across the board, and it will come into regular calls that they have. So it's just one way, but it's very helpful for us because it means that all of our work is cemented in the actual reality of the conversations, and particularly when we're doing account-based marketing campaigns, for example, that are like we're reaching five companies in the world, yeah. It's good to know how you're discussing your work with them. But also that's sent round to every single person in the technical team who is then required as part of their KPIs to review that work and to feedback and to show how it's integrating into their development.
It's a really important challenge, I think, for any deep tech company.
Will Tope: Yeah. And I think LiNa does pretty good at that, right? I think when we have our town halls and all the rest of it, I think a lot of the people are probably bored of me talking about what the price of lithium is and why that's important, and how do you look at levelized cost of storage and where the market's shifting, and the difference between long duration and short duration. But that's ultimately part of my job as well is to make sure that we're all singing from the same hymn sheet of what, what is- ... the external reality. And I think that's not just marketing; I think that's commercial as well to a certain degree in a deep tech company.
I think my staff finally believe me that I tend to be pretty transparent about what it take on the commercial and more financial side, rather than the marketing side, but more the financial side of the business. How do we make certain decisions? How do we manage cash? How do we look at runway?
What's the perfect runway to have? All of this stuff. I think I bore my staff by talking them through this is how we do it. Talking them through the difference between a convertible loan note versus equity investment, and I think they're finally starting to believe me. It's like, okay, a lot of the people in that room are gonna one day be a CEO, right?
That's what I truly believe, is a lot of those people, whether they believe it or not right at that second, right? If you ride the wave of a high-growth startup, you're hooked for life, right? And a lot of those people are gonna end up wanting to, to roll the dice themselves one day. And so- I think it can be a lot of fun because engineers and scientists are incredibly smart individuals. They can grasp... finance is easy compared to nanostructures or whatever. They're working on the porous layer of the ceramic that week. And the trick is to I think, try to bring everyone on the journey where we can get excited by what everyone else is doing in the company.
Katherine Keddie: Looking forward, when you think about the role of marketing as one part of this commercial development, what does that look like for you?
Will Tope: Right now, it really is, as you can tell, I'm doing a lot. If I look at the company, a lot of my time is spent, call it marketing, call it business development, whatever you want, providing that, that interface to customers, et cetera.
And despite that, we've seen a huge amount of valuable commercial relationships, the majority of which start as inbound, right? But as the amount of inbound interest increases because you start becoming a bigger company and all the rest of it, honestly, it's b- it's not even my own decision at this point.
There's a recognition that, okay, at some point we're gonna need to grow the commercial function of our business. I cannot be; we cannot afford to have all these inbounds coming in siphoned through the restrictive point, which is just me, Will Tope, as the CEO. There's clearly, with AI and all the rest of it, just the amount of commercial interest is well beyond our current means to address it.
And so with the upcoming scale-up and with the additional resources we have, for sure we're gonna have to take that step, which I've generally avoided and pushed back for, delayed as long as we can. But we're gonna have to bring in the expertise to, as you say, have a true commercial and marketing function.
I still don't wanna say sales just yet. But we will need to build that commercial and marketing into our business.
Katherine Keddie: So it's time now that you've got that traction.
Will Tope: I think it's time now that we've got more inbound traction than, than we, We barely are able to keep up with the inbound traction.
And what that obviously tells you is that if you were actively pursuing outbound traction, then your hopper is probably far bigger than you even realise. Because you can't just wait for these tier one companies to continue to email you. It's just a symptom that there are probably so many others that you can develop projects with if you have the necessary resources to outreach, and that's on a global scale as well.
If we look at, okay, we've got great opportunities in India and the Middle East that I've mentioned in particular, where we've taken action, we've done pilot projects. But then I look further afield, and Latin America looks like a really exciting spot for energy storage. Australia, we've got some inbound leads coming from there.
Asia, we have a huge amount of interest. And so there are geographies as well that we just need to attack and America as well, with the AI boom is another obvious example, where Texas has a lot of sun and a lot of power consumption. And a lot of good reasons to put a LiNa energy system down.
Katherine Keddie: Exciting. Okay. Unfortunately, 'cause I would love to chat about this forever, but unfortunately we are coming to the end of our time. What I'm hearing is watch the space. A lot of exciting things coming up. But can you give us an idea of- what is next for LiNa Energy?
What is next for LiNa Energy
Will Tope: Absolutely. For sure I would encourage people to keep following the journey.
The best place still is, and I recognise speaking to a marketer, you might tell me why I'm doing it all wrong. But the best place to get up-to-date live information on what the company do, is doing is to follow the company page on LinkedIn or follow myself on LinkedIn. And you get a steady stream of what's going on in the lab, whether it just be the mundane activities of the day or that next big project or that next milestone, et cetera.
And then the website as well, but LinkedIn is really the live feed. In terms of what's next-
Katherine Keddie: We'll have your LinkedIn, your website, and your personal LinkedIn all in the show notes so people can find you there. Amazing. And thank you so much for your time. This was fascinating.
Will Tope: Enjoyed it.
Katherine Keddie: Okay. Thank you everyone else for listening, and catch us next week for another episode of Scaling Green-Tech. Goodbye.
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