Gabe Elias is the CEO of Material Hybrid Manufacturing. Originally from Miami, Florida, he is a 7-time Formula One World Champion design engineer, meaning he is the most successful American in F1 history to date. He co-founded Material with Dr. Chris Reyes to actualize his research on multi-material 3D printing (specifically the 3D printing of batteries), utilizing his experience in Formula 1 and automotive design to develop applications to bring this powerful technology to market.
What led you to found Material?
I am a mechanical engineer, originally from Miami, Florida. I spent 13 years, basically my entire professional career, in automotive design and engineering. I’ve always been interested in cars and as a kid, I was really hell-bent on designing a Formula One (F1) car at some point. I would say that molded my first 25 years of life.
I started at Honda’s R&D in Columbus, Ohio as an engine design engineer for two and a half years. I did everything up to that point to try to position myself for a chance to get to Formula One, so when Honda announced they were re-entering Formula One in 2013 as an engine manufacturer, I raised my hand to be the first American to help them in their F1 efforts. Unfortunately, my boss immediately shot me down, saying I’d have to be at Honda for 25 years before that was possible.
So I took the weekend and decided if I was going to pursue this I needed to do it now. I quit my job, sold everything I owned, took five suitcases, and moved to England for a master’s at Oxford Brookes in applied mechanical engineering. I had an industrial project developing simulation methods for Le Mans prototype cars that interested a lot of F1 teams. I published my work in the SAE Journal and got a job at the Mercedes-AMG F1 team in 2014, which was the first year of their 7 consecutive championship run. I became the winningest American in F1 history as a design engineer across three departments.
When I was at Mercedes F1, it was the first time I had ever seen additive manufacturing used in a high-performance application. At Merc, we had what’s known as a water-to-air intercooler and it has a thousand sub-components to it. These intercoolers were very prone to failure because of the vibrations and the micro tubes would crack and we would have to seal them up. This made them very expensive and very complicated to make and service. So some team members came up with the idea to 3D print the whole thing in one piece. It is a high-performance piece of machinery and it was successful in our case, winning us multiple championships.
Everything connected for me after moving back to the US in 2020 to work at Rivian for the next 3 years. During this time, I reconnected with one of my friends Miles, who I met doing undergrad at the University of Miami, and the person who introduced me to my co-founder Dr. Chris Reyes. The lightbulb went off when meeting Chris, who explained his battery 3D printing research and being the first person to fully 3D print a Li-Ion battery, many years prior. We could have used a machine to print batteries a hundred times over during my time in the industry, so I was immediately intrigued by the possibilities. We started moonlighting on this 3D-printed battery project until gaining significant traction last year to found Material.
Given your background in automotive design, what industries or applications are you focusing on for Material’s 3D printed battery technology?
With my background, our initial pitch was “We’re going to make unusually shaped automotive batteries and change how cars are shaped forever.” That ends up not being a good use case for a couple of reasons.
For one, our printer bed is currently 550 by 350 millimeters, with plans to significantly increase that over time. It’s big but not like a car battery size — you need a massive printer for that. The second thing is, when people ask about applications in an EV, you could probably just shift the battery pack plus or minus 150mm in any direction under the floors since they’re not really that space-constrained yet, but as the industry works to develop its next generation of vehicles, they will have to further conform to traditional packaging requirements, leading to the use of our technology
We started asking ourselves, “What is space-constrained?” The answer is basically all consumer electronics and small devices. A great thing that’s happened in the last 12 months is AI proliferation and the need for higher levels of compute. Smaller devices need to do more and run longer for users like us, but battery capacity isn’t increasing at the same rate as compute power needs.
As devices require more power and runtime, we need unique ways to fit batteries where you couldn’t before. We’ve highlighted consumer electronics, drones, CubeSats, and a lot of smaller applications where customers want this solution. It’s not the car or plane companies that make sense initially. It’s really for people who can’t fit a battery in their device the way they need it to. It’s not about shifting battery packs in EVs a few millimeters. It’s allowing entirely new device designs no longer centered around the battery itself.
Does a customer come to you with a concept or device and then you would make a battery to fit it?
Initial conversations with customers typically involve them bringing us a product design exterior surface and a void where the proposed battery will go. An example of this might be augmented reality glasses profiles with high compute and unusual shapes (because everyone wants to look fashionable wearing compute on their head).
For those unusual curved shapes and voids, you can’t just buy a battery off-the-shelf, especially when utilizing 3D curves instead of planar 2D cells. What happens if the arms on your glasses curve around the temples? You can’t fit a flat piece in that curved shape, but we could print a battery following the full 3D form in that space.
Customers come to us saying, “This is our current battery capacity and runtime. Can you fit more capacity in this given space?” Then we optimize around that. At the bare minimum, we’re finding at least 15% more energy capacity than their current single cell. For multi-cell packs, that energy density increase goes up quite significantly since we’re printing battery material in spaces you previously couldn’t.
For example, in a Tesla, you have hundreds of cylindrical cells stacked on the floor. But there’s wasted space between each cell, plus excess casing, bracketry, and bus bars, etc. We print that all in one optimized piece, removing those excess components. You either make the pack smaller for the same capacity or increase capacity in the same given volume.
It becomes a Pandora’s box experience talking to customers because they start changing the whole design. They’ll say “Well this is how we were constrained by off-the-shelf batteries available. But if we use your batteries without that limitation, we might just redesign everything.” Then you get into really interesting conversations re-thinking the product design no longer centered around the battery itself.
What groundbreaking or previously unachievable advancements has Material made possible with its 3D printing battery technology?
Our whole world is about to change. Inevitably, there’s a tremendous energy demand that we as the human race, are all applying to everything. That energy demand needs to be presented in various forms going forward.
For me, the manufacturing mechanisms, machinery, and futuristic material blends are really the core underpinnings of this technology. With our specialized multi-material 3D printer design for printing batteries, I approached its development alongside our co-founders using the same systematic approach we took when designing Formula One race cars. We’re methodically upgrading each component, adding more complexity, increasing the print speed, and reducing weight – advancing it step-by-step through an iterative process.
When you boil it down, we’re creating a tool to create boundless sources of energy.
Why hasn’t this been done before?
A couple of companies previously attempted to develop 3D-printed batteries but failed to commercialize the technology. We believe the reason they fell short is because they went about it completely the wrong way. They constrained themselves to elements of conventional battery manufacturing processes, trying to simply adjust and augment existing approaches.
When those companies tried to create the actual batteries, they encountered various limitations in effectively utilizing the spaces that were previously inaccessible with traditional methods. However, we at Material have solved that issue. Our solution lies in our specialized proprietary print mediums that we’ve developed ourselves; our unique printer, the way we deposit those print materials, our customized deposition process, post-processing techniques, and proprietary materials. Everything we specialize at Material will allow us to succeed where others cannot.
Are there any specific milestones that you’re most excited to hit?
Our current focus is on improving energy density in our printed batteries. Over the past five months, we’ve been printing coin cells and refining our printer to achieve this goal. We’re constantly experimenting with different chemistry formulations and adjusting our approach as we progress. By combining these chemistry refinements with ongoing printer enhancements for speed and quality, we’re steadily moving towards our target: achieving industry-standard volumetric energy capacity and specific energy density. These improvements represent the key milestones we’re most excited about reaching in the near future.
We’re progressing on that performance path right now, with ample room to extract more performance gains by optimizing our printer, improving how we print, and perfecting our processes. Once we achieve our target-specific energy density, we’ll then concentrate on fully leveraging the 3D printing capabilities. This way we can really capitalize on the complex volumes and shapes of the unique form factors customers want to create.
The projected $400 billion global lithium-ion battery market by 2030 is massive and only continuing to grow. The estimated $63.5 billion consumer electronics segment alone is immense. We’re aiming to capture a small slice of that, which for us would represent a tremendous market share. Just 1-2% penetration would be enough to drive transformative change in how energy is stored in small devices. And as we scale up our production methods for larger applications, the possibilities become boundless.
There is a limit to battery energy density compared to fossil fuels, with the simplest example being a kilo of gasoline holding around 22-24 times more usable energy than the same weight of Li-Ion battery material. The great advantage of our technology is that our machines are chemistry agnostic. As new battery chemistries emerge, we can develop printable formulations to increase the energy density of printed batteries. We’re not constrained to lithium-ion and we plan to print sodium-ion batteries. We have already printed lithium titanate oxide anodes, and are looking at graphite anodes and lithium manganese nickel cobalt (LMNC) cathodes as well. We’re exploring all viable chemistries to boost energy capacity, with each having unique constraints on printable mediums that we dive into.
We’re currently in the midst of our seed fundraising round and are eager to bring on board the top talent in additive manufacturing and advanced battery technology. We would love to hear from hardware investors who understand transformative deep tech and where energy solutions need to go, as well as any brilliant battery engineers out there to reach out to us.