A company called Sila has raised $300 million from private investors to expand its battery materials factory in Moses Lake, Washington. The round was led by Atreides Management and Sutter Hill Ventures, with participation from 8VC, Bessemer Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, and funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates Inc. TechCrunch

The factory started production in September 2025 and currently makes enough material for up to 2 gigawatt-hours of battery capacity per year. The expansion funded by this round is intended to increase that to tens of gigawatt-hours annually, enough material to supply batteries for more than 100,000 electric vehicles. Sila describes the plant as the nation's first factory producing this type of battery material at the scale needed for cars. Sila Press

To understand what Sila makes, think of a rechargeable battery as having two sides. One side, called the anode, stores energy when the battery charges. Most batteries today use graphite for this part. Sila makes a replacement material that uses silicon mixed with carbon. Silicon can hold more energy than graphite, so batteries made with it can store more energy and charge faster. The catch is that pure silicon swells and breaks down over repeated charging cycles, which is why Sila combines it with carbon to keep it stable. TechCrunch

Sila already has agreements to supply this material to Mercedes and Panasonic for car batteries. It also sells to consumer electronics companies including Whoop, as well as drone manufacturers and satellite companies. The company was founded in 2011 and is based in Alameda, California. Its co-founder and CEO, Gene Berdichevsky, was the seventh employee at Tesla. Sila has now raised approximately $1.6 billion in total private funding. TechCrunch

The road to this point has not been straight. In 2024, Sila raised $375 million to finish building the Moses Lake factory, but at a lower valuation: the company, once valued at $3.3 billion, saw that figure drop by roughly $1 billion to closer to $2 billion. Bloomberg The factory's timeline moved through several stages, with construction completion targeted for early 2025, testing begun in April 2025, and production starting in September. Sila Press

Sila chose the Moses Lake site with growth in mind. According to the company's own announcements from 2022, the location has the potential for expansion to 15 times its initial investment and output, which fits with the large-scale expansion now being funded. Sila Press

Looking at the bigger picture, the $300 million raise shows that investors are still willing to fund battery materials companies that have proven they can manufacture at the scale carmakers need, even as the broader electric vehicle market has grown more slowly than expected. Silicon anodes have long been seen as one of the most practical ways to improve how much energy a battery can hold without redesigning the rest of the battery. The challenge was never whether silicon can store more energy. It was keeping the material from breaking down over time. Sila's approach of mixing silicon with carbon is one solution to that problem, and reaching factory-scale production with paying customers like Mercedes and Panasonic gives the company a level of credibility that most battery startups never achieve.

The gap between the current 2 gigawatt-hours of output and the target of tens of gigawatt-hours is large, and the money needed to close it will probably exceed this single $300 million round. Making battery materials at high volumes is not just about building bigger equipment. It is about keeping the material consistent from batch to batch, because small variations can cause problems in the final batteries that carmakers install in vehicles. The Moses Lake site has room to grow physically, but the real engineering challenge is producing at high volume without quality problems, not just turning the factory on.

The mix of investors is also worth noting. T. Rowe Price's participation through advised funds and accounts, alongside existing venture backers, suggests the round attracted investors who typically come in at later stages, not just early-stage venture money. Sutter Hill Ventures, which led alongside Atreides Management, has a history of backing large-scale technology infrastructure companies. Whether the round closed at a valuation above or below the roughly $2 billion mark set in 2024 was not disclosed in the available reporting.

Sila's story follows a familiar pattern for battery materials startups: the science works in the lab, building a factory that can produce the material consistently at volume is hard and expensive, and convincing carmakers to actually use it in their batteries is harder still. Sila has cleared the first two hurdles and has supply deals with Mercedes and Panasonic that suggest the third is underway. The $300 million announced today funds the next phase of that climb.