Ion Storage Systems names new CEO

Reprinted from the Washington Business Journal and written by Nate Doughty

Beltsville solid-state battery maker Ion Storage Systems Inc. has rung in the new year with a fresh CEO and other key executive appointments as it enters apivotal moment of commercial development.

Jorge Diaz Schneider now leads the company and replaces Ricky Hanna, a former executive director of battery operations at Apple Inc., as Ion's CEO. Ion also announced the appointments of David McKenery as president and general counsel and Eric Lind as the company's first chief commercial officer.

Diaz Schneider told me his succession comes as Ion transitions from the technical feasibility stage — where it focused on designing and testing basic capabilities for its battery — to one that prioritizes validation of this tech by commercializing it for its customers. The U.S. Army is the first customer it's selling its batteries to, working to deliver 1.4 million for military use.

Diaz Schneider, a former vice president of advanced energy storage materials and lithium recycling at Charlotte, North Carolina-based chemicals manufacturer Albemarle Corp., said the goal in the months ahead will be to work with customers to find use cases for its battery technology, which can be designed to fit many devices or become a component of systems designed tostore energy. He said he will be relocating to Greater Washington to lead the 75-person company.

"It is a very flexible technology, so the specificity of examples is not necessarily clear because it could be a lot of things, which is where the value of the technology comes from," he said. "It could go into consumer electronics. It could be a military application. It could be all these different uses because of the flexibility of the technology and the speed with which it can be developed."

This focus on application-specific optimization is crucial as Ion looks to accelerate its path to commercialization. Diaz Schneider declined to share revenue figures.

Last May, Ion opened a 30,000-square-foot facility manufacturing facility next to its headquarters at 12500 Baltimore Ave. and plans to produce one megawatt hour of batteries annually. Diaz Schneider noted that previous targets of reaching 10 megawatt hours of battery production by early 2025 needed to be recalibrated as the company transitions from its pilot product and conducts testing on a more finalized product.

"That testing is taking longer than expected," he said. "Anytime you're scaling up a new technology, there are complexities the more you put it into a finishedproduct that are a function of discovery."

Diaz Schneider said Hanna has taken on a special adviser role to thecompany's board.

"He remains an active supporter of the company going into 2025," he saidof Hanna.

The replacement of Hanna as CEO comes shortly after another top executive departure. Chief Financial Officer Ben Chiu left Ion in November to take on thesame role at Rockville-based Bakery de France, a national supplier of frozen French and artisan breads for restaurants and grocery stores. Diaz Schneider said Neil Ovadia, who joined Ion in 2020 and now serves as its vice president of corporate strategy and finance, took over Chiu's duties following his departure.

Unlike more traditional lithium-ion batteries, Ion's batteries don't use graphite or rare earth elements, instead relying on ceramic materials. Its batteries also don't require cooling systems or heavy fire barriers, making them cheaper to manufacture for use in small devices such as watches and smart phones to much more power-intensive products like electric vehicles.

Ion has received more than $10 million in awards from the Department ofEnergy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy program and to date has raised more than $62 million in outside investment, the most recent tranche came in November when it scored a $10 million debt investment from Huntington Beach, California-based Leonid Capital Partners, a Department of Defense-trusted capital provider that backs startups and medium-sized businesses.

Eric Wachsman, a University of Maryland professor, founded the company in 2012 along with Chief Technology Officer Greg Hitz and spun it out of the Maryland Energy Innovation Institute, a university-run incubator, in 2015.

Published January 8, 2025