Carlsbad-based Smartville Inc., was founded in 2019, and since that time, the company that repurposes electric vehicle batteries and develops second-life energy storage systems has not only been smart but also productive.
Co-Founder and CEO
Smartville, Inc.
In less than four years, Smartville has been awarded $20 million in supportive funding through government grants from the U.S. Department of Energy and the California Energy Commission as well as non-dilutive cash awards during that time frame.
Spun out of UC San Diego’s Center for Energy Research, Smartville has grown from two people – co-founders Antoni Tong and Mike Ferry – to 15 employees building hubs that service batteries and provide grid energy storage.
“Not only has our company grown from seed stages to a lot of support, but a lot of things have transpired that highlight importance of what we do today,” Tong said.
Its initial trademarked product, Smartville 360, is used to store excess solar power, lower energy bills and provide back-up during grid outages and planned shutdowns during emergencies.
Powering Nissan Plant
Smartville has also caught the attention of at least one automaker with a vast global reach.
The company was recently contracted by Nissan North America to install a 500-kilowatt-hour Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) at its North American headquarters in Franklin, Tennessee, using second-life Nissan LEAF electric vehicle battery packs. The trademarked storage system is expected to be installed and operational at Nissan North America’s Tennessee assembly facility by the second quarter of 2024.
Tong said that Smartville has strong commercial traction and a growing pipeline of critical acclaim, in part because BESS results in less minerals mined, less carbon generated from new battery manufacturing and most EV batteries reused fully before being recycled.
Nearly $6M from the DOE
Earlier this year, the company received its second major grant from the DOE through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law – $5.9 million – and Smartville is currently managing six government-funded projects across the country.
Co-Founder and COO
Smartville, Inc.
“The DOE is like an advanced research agency, it likes to like to invest in high-risk, high-reward efforts, kind of like an angel investor,” Ferry said. “They don’t expect them all to pay off but the things that do pay off, they expect them to be big. They also don’t want to invest in a laboratory project or science project and you put a bow on it at the end and call it quits. They want to see if the technology is valid, they want to see a path to commercialization.”
The company completed contracting in August with the DOE for its latest project where it can pursue its next-gen product by initiating initial manufacturing at its local facility as well as deploy a major project in central California with the state’s largest independent power producer. The entire scope of work is scheduled to last through July 2026.
Tong said the company will soon announce a deal with a major Tier 1 U.S. utility that has already purchased Smartville’s turnkey 360 battery system.
The Circular Battery Economy
Globally, more than 1 terawatt hours’ worth of lithium-ion batteries are being created; the majority will power electric vehicles. At the same time, there’s a strong shift to a “circular battery economy” where lithium battery values are optimized, reused and material recaptured in a sustainable way, Tong said.
Key stakeholders of the circular battery economy, such as auto original equipment manufacturers, utility companies and the DOE are working with Smartville to seed and scale up those solutions.
“Smartville wants to position ourselves as a tech provider. We have worked intelligently in past four years developing our solutions, but I would still describe this as infancy,” Tong added. “We hope starting from this point we can iterate and find a vehicle to scale our solutions. We are not there yet. The road ahead is still very long.”
Ferry said the hope is to grow the company. Smartville is planning a Series A funding round in the next three to nine months.
“We are at an inflection point because for the last four years we’ve been grant funded as an R& D company for the most part,” Ferry said. “That’s sort of our bread and butter. Where we’re at, at this point now, we have products and customers, and we now need to scale. We need to grow from 15 to 100 employees, we need to grow from doing a few demo projects to large adoption and large manufacturing.”
Smartville, Inc.
FOUNDED: 2019
CO-FOUNDERS AND CEO: Antoni Tong and Mike Ferry
HEADQUARTERS: Carlsbad
BUSINESS: Battery energy storage
EMPLOYEES: 15
WEBSITE: smartville.io
CONTACT: info@smarville.io
SOCIAL IMPACT: Part of the circular chain of repurposing batteries and keeping the environment
NOTABLE: Smartville spun out of UC San Diego’s Center for Energy Research
