Colin Wessells is the CEO at Natron Energy, which he co-founded in his Palo Alto garage in 2012 as a spin-out of foundational work performed during his PhD thesis. Over the past eleven years, he has led Natron’s sodium-ion battery product development from an early stage chemistry dream to a UL listed product deployed in industrial sites across the United States, while growing its team from one to one hundred-and-seventy.
He has raised over $130 million in venture capital investments and government awards. He also served as principal investigator for two ARPA-E awards and six funded user proposals at the Molecular Foundry, a user facility at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. He is an author over fifty peer reviewed publications and issued patents. He holds PhD, MS, and BS degrees from Stanford in materials science and engineering.
Natron Energy offers safe, high power, long lived battery products for industrial and grid applications ranging from data center UPS to EV fast charging to materials handling. These products are based on a new, fully differentiated cell chemistry that Natron has commercialized faster than any other new battery technology, ever.