A Broomfield, Colorado startup developing anode-free sodium-ion batteries has secured $10.15 million in seed funding led by Voyager Ventures, with Union Square Ventures and Buff Gold Ventures participating. According to reporting by Axios Pro Rata, Mana Battery is positioning itself as an American answer to Chinese dominance in next-generation energy storage.
The round marks something of a coming-out for Mana, which until recently subsisted on government grants and a modest pre-seed convertible note. The company says cumulative funding has now crossed $14 million, though this figure has not been independently verified. For a venture tackling battery chemistry—a capital-intensive, slow-burn proposition if ever there was one—that figure remains lean.
What Mana is attempting, though, carries technical intrigue. The company is eliminating the anode active material that conventional sodium-ion cells depend on. During the first charge cycle, sodium plates directly onto a current collector, bypassing the hard-carbon anode layer most competitors employ. The design, Mana argues, should boost energy density while shaving costs by removing an entire component from the bill of materials. A GlobeNewswire release detailing the company's partnership with French battery maker Saft outlines the approach.
A patent application filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty and published in April laid out the particulars: sodium-borate-salt electrolytes matched with anode-free plating. Nicholas Singstock, Tyler Evans, and Heather Platt are named as inventors, according to GoVeda patent records. Mana also claims its electrolyte formulation is fluorine-free and "self-extinguishing," diverging from the industry-standard NaPF6 chemistry. Independent performance data, however, have yet to surface in peer-reviewed channels.
On its website, Mana makes bold assertions: 40 percent lower materials cost than the cheapest Chinese lithium-ion cells, energy density rivaling lithium iron phosphate, and operation across temperatures from -40°C to 60°C. These performance claims remain unverified by independent testing. The company says the technology can slot into existing lithium-ion manufacturing lines—a claim that, if validated, would ease the path to commercialization considerably.
A French Partner With Deep Pockets
In August, Mana inked a joint development agreement with Saft, the battery subsidiary of TotalEnergies. The collaboration targets defense, aerospace, rail, datacenter, and industrial uninterruptible power supply markets—sectors where safety margins are tight and supply-chain sovereignty increasingly non-negotiable. "Sodium-ion is a strategically important chemistry," Kamen Nechev, Saft's chief technology and innovation officer, said in the announcement. "Anode-free designs are its most promising frontier."
Mana CEO Tyler Evans framed the partnership as a fast lane from lab to field. Saft brings manufacturing heft and the kind of qualification expertise necessary for high-reliability applications, where a battery failure can mean more than a dead phone. The company's development roadmap envisions 5 ampere-hour anode-free cells and over 100 kilograms of electrolyte production this year, scaling to 10-plus ampere-hour cells and more than 10 metric tons of electrolyte tolling by 2028. Domestic cell and electrolyte manufacturing is pegged for 2030, according to Mana's website.
The advisory roster reflects the ambitions: Doug Campbell, a Solid Power alumnus, alongside Voyager's Leonardo Banchik, Union Square Ventures' Albert Wenger as a board observer, and Buff Gold's Sally Hatcher.
Riding—or Chasing—the Sodium Wave
Sodium-ion technology occupies an odd place in the energy-storage landscape. The International Energy Agency called this year "a pivotal year for the technology's scaling efforts" in a February commentary, noting that sodium-ion production sat below one percent of lithium-ion output in 2025. By mid-year, 34 Chinese enterprises had announced plans for 45 sodium-ion cell production bases across 20 provinces, totaling 293.7 gigawatt-hours of planned capacity, according to the China Energy Storage Alliance in September.
Announcements, of course, are not the same as deployment. As of mid-January, S&P Global Commodity Insights tallied just 148 megawatt-hours of completed sodium-ion battery energy storage systems worldwide. CATL, the Ningde-based battery giant, unveiled its "Naxtra" sodium-ion brand in April of last year and launched the first mass-production sodium-ion passenger vehicle with Changan in February. HiNa Battery connected the first 50 megawatts of a 100-megawatt, 200-megawatt-hour project in Hubei back in June 2024, the company said.
The economics remain tricky. A CRU analysis found that sodium-ion reaches cost parity with lithium iron phosphate only if lithium carbonate prices hold above $20 per kilogram—a threshold that fluctuates with mining output and demand cycles. "Current lithium price levels are not yet high enough for sodium-ion to undercut LFP in most applications," the IEA noted, though it conceded sodium-ion proves "already cost-effective" in extremely cold climates and in hybrid battery configurations.
The Domestic Angle
Mana's pitch leans heavily on manufacturing the technology in the United States, a strategy that dovetails with the current policy environment. The Inflation Reduction Act's Section 45X advanced manufacturing production credit applies per kilowatt-hour to battery cells made domestically, regardless of chemistry, per IRS guidance. Sodium-ion cells qualify if they're manufactured in the U.S. and sold to unrelated parties. Meanwhile, Section 301 tariffs raised duties on Chinese battery components to 25 percent in 2024, improving the relative economics for domestically built alternatives, according to Federal Register filings.
Interestingly, sodium sits outside the U.S. critical minerals list, which still focuses on lithium, nickel, cobalt, and graphite, according to the USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries. That frames sodium-ion as a supply-chain hedge rather than a critical-mineral solution—a subtle but important distinction in policy circles. Europe's Battery Regulation, meanwhile, mandates digital battery passports starting in February 2027 and phased carbon-footprint declarations, adding compliance layers for any company eyeing exports, per EUR-Lex documentation.
Mana's business model blends joint-venture cell manufacturing with electrolyte sales and licensing to the broader sodium-ion ecosystem, the company outlined in a 2025 LinkedIn post. U.S. Department of Energy NEPA categorical exclusion filings from May and September reference small-scale R&D support for "safe and domestically-manufactured anode-free sodium batteries" with fluorine-free electrolytes. The company has also secured ARPA-E grants for a project titled "Low-Cost Cradle-to-Grave: Anode-free Sodium Batteries via Fluorine-Free Electrolytes," DOE records show.
Last September, SAE International published the J3335 recommended practice for sodium-ion battery cell tests, establishing an initial qualification pathway for automotive use. BloombergNEF reported the benchmark cost for a four-hour standalone battery project fell 27 percent year-over-year to $78 per megawatt-hour in 2025, setting a moving target for sodium-ion competitiveness.
Mana plans to ship its first 5-ampere-hour cells this year. Whether anode-free chemistry can resolve sodium-ion's known cycle-life and dendrite challenges at commercial scale is an open engineering question. The Saft partnership suggests the company will try to answer it first in high-stakes applications—defense, aerospace, critical infrastructure—before pursuing grid-scale volume. That's a prudent sequencing if the technology holds up, and a narrow escape hatch if it doesn't.
