TL;DR
Sila raised $300M to expand its Moses Lake silicon anode plant, pitching US-made battery materials as an alternative to Chinese supply chains.
Sila, the battery materials company formerly known as Sila Nanotechnologies, has raised $300 million in a private equity round led by Atreides Management and Sutter Hill Ventures to expand its silicon anode manufacturing plant in Moses Lake, Washington. 8VC, Bessemer Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, and T Rowe Price also participated, alongside existing investors including In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the US intelligence community. The round brings total funding to well above $1 billion for a company that has shipped its battery material in a single consumer product, the WHOOP fitness band.
Silicon anode technology replaces the graphite in conventional lithium-ion batteries with silicon, which can store roughly 20 percent more energy by weight. Sila’s product, Titan Silicon, was the first commercial silicon anode material to reach consumers when it launched inside the WHOOP wearable in 2021. Mercedes-Benz has named the electric EQG as the first vehicle to use the material, but no automotive batteries containing Titan Silicon have shipped yet.
The Moses Lake facility sits on 160 acres and opened in the fall of 2025, running Phase 1 production at a capacity of 2 gigawatt-hours. The $300 million funds Phase 2 expansion, which Sila says will scale the site toward a target of 250 gigawatt-hours over five years, a figure that would make it one of the largest battery material plants ever built. That target remains aspirational, as even major automakers building US battery plants have struggled to scale production at the speeds their initial plans projected.
The supply chain pitch is central to the raise. China controls more than 90 percent of global anode material processing and more than 80 percent of battery cell production, according to figures the company cites from the Department of Energy and International Energy Agency. Sila positions its Moses Lake plant as a domestic alternative, producing silicon anode material from silane gas supplied by REC Silicon under a long-term agreement rather than relying on Chinese graphite.
Gene Berdichevsky, Sila’s co-founder and CEO, was among Tesla’s earliest employees and founded the company in 2011 to develop silicon anode chemistry as an alternative to the graphite anodes that dominate lithium-ion batteries. The company raised $375 million in June 2024 from investors including Coatue and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. In-Q-Tel’s presence on the cap table signals that US defense and intelligence agencies view domestic battery material supply as a national security priority.
The round arrives as next-generation battery technologies attract growing investment from both automakers and financial sponsors, with billions flowing into solid-state, silicon anode, and sodium-ion chemistries. Whether Sila can scale from a wearable-sized product to automotive volumes at a pace that justifies its fundraising trajectory is the question this round is designed to answer. No silicon anode company has yet crossed the gap between a 2 gigawatt-hour pilot and the kind of production capacity that would make it a genuine alternative to Chinese supply chains.
